MobileVLCKit User Defined Metadata

[EncodedNybble]

Hi All,

There doesn't seem to be a "MobileVLCKit" section of the forum, so, I'm posting this here. Please let me know if I should post elsewhere.

I'm having some issues when using MobileVLCKit on iOS both on device and in simulator when viewing some live streams that contain user defined metadata that is sent once every second. The player just freezes, the video does not update and neither does the audio. There do not seem to be any errors in the logs. It is distinctly possible that maybe the metadata is malformed or something along that line, but it's hard for me to know with nothing in the logs.

The metadata is AMF metadata for an FLV over RTMP and ID3 tag TXXX over HLS in an m3u8 file. It also seems to not be able to show video for an HLS m3u8 file. I hear audio, but the screen is blank (did not change from the default white from the initial screen of the project) but that is a different problem it seems.

I'm simply using the "SimplePlayback" example and changing the URL used for the VLCMedia instance.

Does anyone know how to get user defined metadata from either ID3 tag TXXX or AMF metadata from an FLV stream. It doesn't seem to fall into any of the default metadata strings defined in MobileVLCKit.

[fkuehne]

Hey!

This is the correct section of the forum to discuss such matters! welcome!

Indeed, VLCKit can only expose defined metadata parameters, so we can't pass-through random elements.

Which version of MobileVLCKit do you use? We greatly improved HLS support for the forthcoming 3.0 release.

Can you share (maybe privately) sample URLs for the streams you have issues with so we can test ourselves?

[EncodedNybble]

Hi Felix (what do you prefer to be called?),

Thanks for your reply. I'm currently using MobileVLCKit version 2.2.2 via a CocoaPod on iOS8. That's a bummer about the metadata passthrough, if there is no passthrough then I cannot use MobileVLCKit for my application and will have to find another library to use or build my own viewer as some metadata parsing is required for a feature. It would be great if there could be some passthrough in future versions though.

As for example URLs, I can send those to you privately, but we will need to coordinate via private message since I will need to set up some devices to stream from and it is difficult for me to guarantee that the streams will be up by the time you want to view them (though I can try).

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[EncodedNybble]

Also worth noting that the ID3 standard indicates that TXXX (and WXXX) can be user defined, so, it'd be nice to send any time those tags are used in a stream/file to send them down to the media delegate (since there can also be multiple TXXX tags, can't really check for "changes" very easily). AMF metadata in FLVs may be a little trickier.

[fkuehne]

Well, VLC exposes a lot of metadata found in mp3 and FLV files, so we can definitely guide you through contributing a patch to make this work.

This is how VLC grows and becomes better: people arrive with special use cases and add support for them.

[EncodedNybble]

@Felix

Great, I can definitely work with you to get a patch to make MobileVLCKit work with my use case. I'm all ears for that.

Let me know via private message or here, when you want me to send you some example URLs of the RTMP metadata issues I was seeing (causing a freeze) as well as the HLS issue (no video).