How to stream videos to iPhone/Blackberry?

Question

I have a site that offers video clips, and I have a couple of thousand mobile users every day, so I wanted to offer the video library in a format that would be viewable from the iphone and blackberry devices.

Can ffmpeg, or any other tool convert videos to a format that will stream in the same fashion youtube does for the mentioned above devices? Is there anything to it, other than linking to the file itself, or does it need some sort of special implementation?

Answer 1

Clarifying @mOlind's answer.

Read this very detailed document from apple

If you are interested in streaming live events to iPhone, streaming live events without special server software, or in sending video on demand with encryption and authentication, you should read this document.

Answer 2

iPhone Case:

first check Apple official documentation. there is information about main streaming architecture. There is more details about live streaming from mpeg-ts streaming source.

or if you wish to stream files with variable bitrate you could check complete solution from IONCANNON blog. There is more details about convertation video files and more.

Answer 3

For broader support it is worth taking a look at Alembix http://alembik.sourceforge.net/overview.html

Answer 4

You could try converting the clips to 3GPP format - most mobile phones can handle that. Here's one page I found about converting to 3GPP, however I have also heard that iPhone can't handle H.263 so you may need to tell it to use H.264 encoding somehow.

Answer 5

You may have a look at the Wowza Media Server 2, http://www.wowzamedia.com/products.html .

I believe they have a free developer license and iPhone HTTP streaming encoding capabilities.

Hope this helps.