Question

I am building an iOS App which displays video streams from a somewhat complex backend. Now while developing I want to be able to have some sort of test video stream, which I can use. Ideally this would also work without internet connection.

The video stream could show for example the current time or just a simple animation. What would be a good way of doing this on a Mac without having to install a whole suite of tools.

Answer 1

On you Mac you can setup a webserver or streaming server to provide you with a constant video stream for testing purposes. You won’t need Internet access. You will, of course, need to ensure that the OSX firewall is either disabled or allows requests to the ports (80, most likely).

Two simple approaches I can see:

• Wowza MPEG-TS stream of the Webcam on your mac
  • Install Wowza Media Server; developer license is free
  • Configure a basic applicaiton with MPEG-TS streaming
  • Use an encoding applicaiton, like Flash Media Live Encoder (free), Wirecast (demo version free), or some other software and start streaming from your webcam to the WMS
  • alternatively, with a bit more effort, you could setup Wowza to stream a file in a loop
  • be sure to get the codec settings correct
• M3U8+MPEG-TS static files over plain HTTP
  • Simple Setup a basic webserver (lighttpd, Apache httpd, Apache Tomcat, whatever) to server static files
  • Whip up an M3U8 file to first point to a .ts media file, and then secondly back to itself
  • Have a look at MPEG-TS/M3U8 live stuff to work out the details. You’ll need a properly segmented video file to start with.