In the Beginning
The two main functions of RabbleTV are listening and broadcasting. Since I first met with RabbleTV to talk about what they wanted one of the most talked about features has always been broadcasting from the app. We decided it was best to leave it out of the first few versions of the app because of the huge development effort that is involved with this one feature.
Once version 1.2 was safe and sound in the App Store I dove into the deep end of live broadcasting from the app. Ben (CTO) and I spent a few days just going through what was on the web and what needed to be re-thought to provide the best experience on the phone.
A BFD
On the desktop version you can create a broadast for Sports, TV / Movies or a RabbleCast. The first 2 have quite a bit of workflow that is doable on the phone, but would require an enormous effort on the client side to accomplish the ease of use that is found on the web. We wireframed the solution, but decided for this release we would stick with RabbleCasts. With workflow set out it was time to create the 1.3 feature branch and get to work.
Build, Buy or Borrow
AVPlayer provides a wonderful API for streaming audio and video. Unfortunately, there isn’t such for sending out audio and video. You really need to drop down to lower level API’s. When I set down to start writing the broadcasting functionality I had 3 choices:
- Write my own
- Use an open source solution
- Purchase and off the shelf solution
I’m a huge proponent of writing my own libraries (if possible)…especially if it centers around a core piece of functionality in the app. In this case, due to the feature timeline, it made sense to go with something stable that someone else had written. I just didn’t have the time to write the library. YET!
There aren’t many open source solutions, but the one I decided to use is MediaLib. After a few configuration settings made I was up and running fairly quickly. I felt a little uneasy about using the library because most of the source code is compiled into static libraries and since this was such an important piece to the app going forward I didn’t want to be caught in a situation where an iOS upgrade broke the library.
Due to the fact I still wasn’t in a place to write my own library we decided it would be worth the money to purchase a license (compiled version) from RealTimeLibs. Being the cautioned person that I am I got in contact with their product support to ask specifically about their iOS 9 support and development, upgrades, licensing and some custom development that we needed to add in. They were very quick in responding and gave me all the information that I need and a license was purchased.
I was assured that the custom development was only going to take 4 hours and would cost X amount extra. No problem. Weeks went by and no word on when the custom development was going to be done. This was very annoying, but still not a deal breaker since I had a stop gap put in place. What was a deal breaker the lack of background support.
When a user was broadcasting and puts the app in the background the stream was disconnect.
RTMP sends / receives audio and video. Even though I was doing audio broadcasts only their was still a video capture session initialized and you can’t broadcast video with the app in the background. I contact their support about this and was told…well not what I wanted to hear and knew better.
It is a good thing I didn’t delete my old manager. It was easy to revert the project back to using my open source based solution.
Having been reaffirmed in my belief of being in control of my app’s libraries I’ll be writing my own over the next few months when time allows.
Testing is Hard
Unlike Bill O’Rilley, I don’t just assume that something is going to work live. Any sort of live media publishing on a mobile device is going to get interrupted by FaceTime, phone calls, phone restarts, etc. A lot of time was spent testing various application states and system interruptions to make sure that listeners were notified, as well as, giving the broadcaster the ability to restart a broadcast if necessary.
I even found a bug with iOS 9 regarding FaceTime.
Additional Features
In addition to broadcasting these additions features and enhancements were added: * iOS 9 support * Spotlight search * Background fetch * Better list caching * New default broadasting image * Comment links now have better touch handling