We release an add-on for the Web Call Server 4 product which allows low-latency video streaming to iOS Safari browser. Now a user can open a laptop or an Android gadget, send a video stream from the built-in camera to the Flashphoner server and broadcast this video stream to Safari browsers on iOS / iPhone / iPad, totally without any loss of quality or performance.
When it comes to typical video clips, no revolution is needed. A pre-recorded video (VOD) plays excellently in a browser with the HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) technology, in quite a remarkable quality. But what about live interactive video broadcasting when a minimum latency is required?
The Internet is full of appeals for help to reduce HLS transmission latency beyond 5 seconds. Yet no useful answers are given. And the reason is evident: the HLS technology simply does not allow playing a video fast enough due to its way of transferring data. As a result, elimination of latency seems impossible.
We, however, managed to solve this problem and minimize latency down to a comfortable level by releasing an add-on for its product Web Call Server 4.
WCS4 is a streaming video server capable of delivering live video stream from a browser to iOS Safari using the Websockets protocol instead of the HLS. Thanks to WCS4, a live video broadcasting to any mobile browser supporting HTML5 is now possible. This includes iOS Safari that still resists embedding WebRTC technology for the tasks like this.
If only developers of Safari for iOS introduced WebRTC support, millions of iPhone and iPod owners would finally get a much simpler way to play streaming video in a browser. However, it is not happening. We found a solution, and we hope it helps many authors to develop services involving direct broadcasting of video to iOS browsers.
Links
https://flashphoner.com/wcs4 – product page
https://flashphoner.com/webrtc-to-ios-safari – iOS Safari video broadcast presentation.
