What I use:

1. VLC player from http://www.videolan.org
2. Http segmenter from http://www.espend.de
3. A web server capable of serving static content (Apache, IIS or any old web server)
4. A powerful computer. Transcoding video in realtime eats CPU. My Intel Core i7 Q720 (4 x 1.6 GHz) barely manages three streams at a time.

Firstly I use a small script to make VLC fetch the ASF stream and convert it to a new H264 transport-stream. This stream is piped into the http segmenter. The segmenter is responsible for chopping the stream into nice small 10 seconds segments and save them to separate .ts (transport-stream) files. A list of these files are stores in a continuously updated m3u8 playlist file. The playlist contains a list of the 5 latest files each containing about 10-seconds of video. The iPad continuously reloads this file and fetches new .ts chunks and needed. These segments are played back-to-back without gaps thus creating an illusion of viewing a stream.

The first thing you need is to setup the VLC | segmenter pipe. I’ve created a small script that does this.

Click to see full size

Then setup a web server to serve the .ts and .m3u8 file. Make sure to setup the mime-types as specified in the specification from Apple.

If you have an iPad you can open safari and navigate to http://ipad.codewrench.net/ to see a demo. This serves a low-quality stream of NRK1. I don’t own an iPhone 4 so I dont know if it works there as well.

I don’t have the server power nor the bandwidth to serve this to everyone, nor do I probably have the right to. So if you want to watch live TV use this description to setup your own system.

I’ve added everything I use to a bundle archive so you can easily start yourself:
download bundle (28 MB RAR file). It’s pre-setup if you unpack to C:\Streaming\

Just unpack and start “00 start_stream_nrk1.cmd”. Wait a bit and navigate to http://your-computers-ip-or-name/ on the ipad.

The new iPad

Unless you have been away in space you probably have heard about the biggest bit of technology news this week. On Wednesday Apple released their tablet PC called…..iPad…., wow that was innovative naming. It’s basically like some Apple designer stumbled on the zoom button on their Xerox copier when copying some iPod Touch/iPhone photos.

Anyway with this latest Apple toy you can use read books, surf the web, read your email and more (sounds familiar?). As with the iPhone this new 1GHz device cannot multitask. That feature is probably reserved for the the iPad Maxi which will come after the iPad Plus that has a camera. It’s important not to give a customer all the features at once. How else are you going to lure your blind followers to pay for upgrades?

Also don’t forget the other big news from Apple. The new Macbook Wheel