900SecondsSDK

Live Streaming Video SDK for iOS

900Seconds SDK is a video streaming library made for easily add geolocated live streaming into your mobile app. It encapsulates the whole stack of video streaming-related tech involved in live streaming process such as handling device camera, processing video with filters and encoding video chunks with ffmpeg, uploading them to your file storage. Also it has a backend that handles app authorization, stores streams objects and can be requested for fetching available streams.

Some of the features the SDK handles:

• shooting the video with device camera
• applying video effects (blur, pixelize, finger painting over video, etc) on the fly
• compress video chunks and upload them to a file storage
• fetching available streams around the geolocation
• video streams playback

Quick start guide

1. Intallation
2. Documentation
3. Basic usage

Installation and dependencies

900Seconds SDK uses several third-party libraries in its work. In order to use it in your project you will need to add those libraries too. These are steps to set all required dependencies:

1. 900Seconds SDK requires following list of libraries and frameworks

   1. Required by GPUImage. GPUImage already linked with SDK, but its dependencies are not
   • CoreMedia
   • CoreVideo
   • OpenGLES
   • AVFoundation
   • QuartzCore
   2. Required by FFMPEG. Only static libraries avcodec.a, avdevice.a, avformat.a, avutil.a are required
   • libavutil
   • libavdevice
   • libavformat
   • libavcodec
   • libz
   3. Required for chunk uploading
   • AWSCore
   • AWSS3
   • libsqllite3

   If you want to be able to run you project on simulator then you also have to add iconv system library to it:

   • libiconv.dylib

   Simply add it in project settings inside "Link Frameworks and Libraries" section.

2. To add 900Seconds SDK to the project you need to add

   • Nine00SecondsSDK.a library. It is compiled for both iPhone and iPhone Simulator architectures. So it can be used for both.
   • All NHS-prefixed header files which come with it
   • Since SDK connects to server via SSL, you should consider IOS 9 ATS and add exceptions for *.livestreamsdk.com into your plist file. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31231696/ios-9-ats-ssl-error-with-supporting-server for details.

   <key>NSAppTransportSecurity</key>
   <dict>
       <key>NSExceptionDomains</key>
       <dict>
           <key>livestreamsdk.com</key>
           <dict>
               <key>NSIncludesSubdomains</key>
               <true/>
               <key>NSTemporaryExceptionAllowsInsecureHTTPLoads</key>
               <true/>
               <key>NSTemporaryExceptionMinimumTLSVersion</key>
               <string>TLSv1.1</string>
           </dict>
       </dict>
   </dict>

3. To use the SDK classes you need to import 900Seconds SDK file:

   #import "Nine00SecondsSDK.h"

   Or you can add headers for specific classes that you want to use:

   `#import "NHSBroadcastManager.h"`
   

Documentation

You can find Apple-style appledoc-generated docs under Nine00SecondsSDK/Docs/ subdirectory. It includes all library's APIs and classes with overview on each.

Basic usage

Overview of all basic library features with comments.

Autorizing the app

First of all, you need to register your app with 900Seconds web interface. Registration will require your application ID. Also in order for library to be able to stream video you have to provide it with an access to your file storage. Currently only AWS S3 is supported. You need to register on AWS, get credentials for file storage and use them while registering your app for 900Seconds SDK. In return 900Seconds will give you secret key which you can use for authorizing the app with SDK.

Authorizing itself is very easy and require just one call to NHSBroadcastManager:

[NHSBroadcastManager registerAppID:@"YOUR_APP_ID"
                        withSecret:@"YOUR_SECRET_KEY"
                    withCompletion:(void ( ^ ) ( NHSApplication *application , NSError *error ))completion];

This call should be made on startup. Presumably on application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: method of your app delegate but it's really your choice, just make it before your start using the SDK. A completion in this method is optional, just to check there were no error. NHSApplication object is a model object which encapsulates your file storage credentials and other app info. The SDK keeps this instance by itself so there is no need to store it somewhere in your app.

Recording video

900Seconds SDK has all the AVFoundation camera-related and ffmpeg encoding logic inside already so you don't need to set anything at all. To start preview video feed from the camera just add previewView from NHSBroadcastManager to your view hierarchy:

self.broadcastManager = [NHSBroadcastManager sharedManager];
self.broadcastManager.qualityPreset = NHSStreamingQualityPreset640HighBitrate;
self.broadcastManager.delegate = self;
self.previewView = [self.broadcastManager createPreviewViewWithRect:self.view.bounds];
[self.view addSubview:self.previewView];

and call startPreview:

[self.broadcastManager startPreview];

You can change camera for recording with

[self.broadcastManager setupCameraInto:...];

Or set live filter to be applied over stream (both broadcast and preview)

[self.broadcastManager setupCameraFilter:... withParams:...];

To start streaming you need just another one call:

[self.broadcastManager startBroadcasting];

This call will create stream object on the backend and start writing and uploading video chunks to the file storage. Also it will start observing your location with CoreLocation as every stream in our SDK obliged to have a location. In order to keep user's privacy coordinates are taken with precision up to only 100 meters.

Additionally you can implement NHSBroadcastManagerDelegate methods to know if everything was successful or why something failed.

To stop streaming and preview just call:

[self.broadcastManager stopBroadcasting];
[self.broadcastManager stopPreview:NO];

Most of preview and broadcasting calls are asynchronous. Implement corresponding NHSBroadcastManagerDelegate methods to know exactly when start/stop methods have finished.

Fetching live streams

All the streams made by your application with the SDK can be fetched from backend as an array of NHSStream objects. NHSStream is a model object which contains information about stream such as it's ID, author ID, when it was started or stopped, how much it was watched through it's lifetime and so on.

There are two main options for fetching streams. The first is to fetch streams with radius around some location point. To perform this fetch you should call

[[NHSBroadcastManager sharedManager] fetchStreamsNearCoordinate:(CLLocationCoordinate2D)coordinate
                                                      withRadius:(CGFloat)radiusInMeters
                                                       sinceDate:(NSDate *)date
                                                  withCompletion:(NHSBroadcastApiCallCompletion)completion];

Fetch will request the backend for list of streams satisfying the parameters. When backend responds the completion will be called. Array of NHSStream objects ordered by distance from coordinate are passed as NSArray under key kNHSApiCompletionStreamsKey of the result, along with NSError object. You can set radius to 0 or date to nil to ignore those parameters, it will return all the streams made by this application.

The second fetch option is to fetch last 30 streams made by specific author.

[[NHSBroadcastManager sharedManager] fetchStreamsOfAuthorWithID:(NSString *)authorID
                                                       untilDate:(NSDate *)untilDate
                                                      completion:(NHSBroadcastApiCallCompletion)completion];

By default any NHSStream object has authorID property set to some unique string generated on first app launch. So every stream has an identifier of an application on a particular device it was made with. Passing this identifier to this method will specify which user streams you want to fetch. If you pass nil instead then backed will return last 30 streams made with this application regardless of author. To fetch streams made by current user you have to pass current application's authorID to this method.

Also you can remove any particular stream by calling

[[NHSBroadcastManager sharedManager] removeStreamWithID:(NSString *)streamID
                                              completion:(void ( ^ ) ( NSError *error ))completion];

Stream playback

To play any stream you can use either SDK player or any other player you want. There are some differences though. 900Seconds SDK can evaluate the popularity of each stream. To make this happen the application must to notify the 900Seconds backend that someone started watching the stream. When the SDK player is used backend gets notified of when and where each particular stream was watched but if the stream is watched by any other player - you just watch the video and nothing else.

The SDK player class is NHSStreamPlayerController. It provides a UIView with video feed to add to any view controller's view hierarchy. To use it you have to initialize it with NHSStream:

NHSStreamPlayerController *player = [[NHSStreamPlayerController alloc] initWithStream:(NHSStream *)stream];
[self.view addSubview:player.view];

Player controller is subclass of MPMoviePlayerController so you can use any standard MediaPlayer methods. To receive callbacks on stream play/stop/stall use NHSStreamPlayerController delegate NHSStreamPlayerControllerDelegate

Alternatively you can play stream by yourself. In order to do this you need to obtain streaming URL from NHSBroadcastManager:

NSURL *streamingURL = [[NHSBroadcastManager sharedManager] broadcastingURLWithStream:(NHSStream *)stream];

You can play this URL in MPMoviePlayer or AVPlayer or any other player. Just remember that it won't increase stream's popularity since backend won't be told of this playback.

Other Requirements

Besides including listed third-party libraries your app have to be deployed at iOS 8 or higher with ARC.