Question

This is a bit of a weird question but, with the functionalities of C++, c# and objective C as we speak is there any possible way for video content to be uploaded whilst its recording. So as you record the video it would be being compressed and uploaded to a website.

Would this involve cutting the video into small parts as you record, hardly noticeable stops and starts during the recording?

If anyone knows if this is at all possible, please let me know.

Sorry for the odd question.

Answer 1

You’ve just asked for streaming media — something that’s been done for over a decade (and, if you overlook “television”, something that’s probably been underway in research settings for several decades).

Typically, the video recorder will feed the raw data through filters of some sort — correct white balance, sharpen or soften the video, image stabilize, and then compress the raw data using a codec. Most codec designs will happily take a block of input, work on it, and then produce a block of encoded data ready for writing. Instead of writing to disk, you could “write” to a socket opened to a remote machine.

Or, if you’re working with an API that only writes to disk, you could easily re-read the data off disk as it is being written and send the data to a remote site. You’d have to “follow” the writing using something like tail -f‘s magic ability to follow the file as it is written. (Heck, if you’re just bodging something together for a one-off, I’d even recommend using tail -f as part of your system.)