How to capture live stream?

[davidb]

If I wish to support watching live tv in my IOS app how do I go about capturing the live stream? I see the CaptureDeviceInputAPI but don't see anything that I think will help. Has anyone done this before or know where to look.

Thanks for any help!

David

[Narflex]

You'd need to do 2 things:

1. Get SageTV to start recording that channel so you have access to viewing it. You *could* just tell it to do a ManualRecording, but that'll leave that artifact around....but without doing a real MiniClient, it gets much trickier to do it cleanly.

2. You can then pull the stream from the MediaServer...however, I'm not sure iOS will playback the stream in the normal format it is recorded in (this would be the same way you stream anything from SageTV).

[davidb]

I can manage starting the recording and stopping and erasing it when its time to stop. I am unclear how to access the "stream from the MediaServer" What I would like to do is get access to the h.264 stream from the hdpvr then send it to ffmpeg for hls streaming/encoding. If I can get to this point I think I can get it working on the IOS side.

David

Originally Posted by Narflex

You'd need to do 2 things:

1. Get SageTV to start recording that channel so you have access to viewing it. You *could* just tell it to do a ManualRecording, but that'll leave that artifact around....but without doing a real MiniClient, it gets much trickier to do it cleanly.

2. You can then pull the stream from the MediaServer...however, I'm not sure iOS will playback the stream in the normal format it is recorded in (this would be the same way you stream anything from SageTV).

[Narflex]

If you look at sage.MediaServer.java you can see the protocol in there. There's also an FFMPEG reader in libavformat/stv.c which reads from that server protocol as well. That'd be the easiest way to get access to it is to use that protocol (SageTV's native code reads from the HDPVR, so you can't really get access into that directly from an outside source).

There is also an HLS server already in SageTV...although no guarantees on how well it will work for you, there were various issues with it and was never really part of production code. It runs on port 31099 (same as miniclient)...the socket listener is in MiniClientSageRenderer.java and the handler is in HTTPLSServer.java. I know I used it many years ago to watch video from SageTV remotely on an iPhone. (when we were working on an iPhone client, which was abandoned)