Sorry everyone, I've been on vacation and haven't kept up with the list.<div><br></div><div>So even though iPhone OS 3.0 is out and has support for streaming videos, I've come to the realization that it's a very poor implementation. Essentially, it's geared towards live streaming of a single stream to many devices. For example, the streaming UI provided by Apple (and which the app cannot replace because Apple hasn't provided any hooks like play() or ffwd() functions) has three buttons: pause, skip back 30 s, and skip to the end. The purpose of the latter button is in a live event where you want to skip to the end of the stream so you are caught up to live tv. There is no seek bar. Now, imagine you are trying to watch a recording using this interface. There is no way to skip past commercials! There's no way to really seek anywhere! Apple has stated that their solution can be used for Video On Demand as well as live streamed events, but obviously their implementation is untenable for VoD.</div>
<div><br></div><div>However, the streaming interface could still be useful if you wanted to watch live tv shows. But it's also so tightly integrated into an HTTP web server approach that I've realized that it's best to facilitate everything through MythWeb. So I checked out the trunk of MythWeb to see what I could do. Immediately I realized that the it has a skin for the iPhone, but it's not the greatest looking and it could be done much better using AJAX and Apple's Dashcode (which throws in the glitter and magic needed to make a webapp look like a real app). I've actually got a new skin working to the point that I can browse recordings (and play around with streaming them using the new streaming interface that won't work well anyways...). From there, I need to try getting live tv streaming working, but there's no built-in support for that already in MythWeb.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Add to all this my vacation and overall annoyance with trying to get a tenable streaming solution for mythtv on the iPhone the past 6 months and I'm a little burnt out on the whole thing (keep in mind I actually build a whole ffmpeg player for the iPhone from scratch this past winter as one of the first forays into this). However, I'll probably pick it up again shortly to at least finish off the iPhone skin without live tv streaming, and then I'll try to add live tv streaming back over the top.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I hope this has helped enlighten others on my progress. If anyone wants to help out and has access to dashcode I'd be happy to have them take a crack at some of the stuff.</div><div><br></div><div>
Thanks,</div><div>Chase Douglas<br></div>