#IOS UPNP PLAYER ISO#
#IOS UPNP PLAYER MAC#

Most have a few files in formats you haven’t heard about in years. One of them uses separate album artwork files in each folder. One of them uses external thumbnail files for each song. One of them uses external subtitle files for each movie. One of them uses an old media encoder that sets the wrong H.264 profile.

#IOS UPNP PLAYER ISO#

One of them plays content from ISO format disc images. One of them zips all media into archives and expects the media player to perform unzipping on-the-fly.

One stores them over a number of NAS drives. One stores all the files in different folders but aliases in a single folder. One of them stores every file in their own folder. One of them stores all their files in a single folder. Another plays only content they’ve ripped for themselves. Another plays only lossless audio in continuous albums. If they all wanted the same features, there might not be a problem but I quickly learned that media is a deeply personal experience and everyone wants to experience it a different way.Įver wondered why all the major media player are a weird kitchen-sink of features bolted onto each other? Media players are a product-space where everyone uses a tiny slice of the features but no two users use the same slice of features and the entire space is really, really broad. I fixed the bugs but now I had a different problem: customers, lots of them, all wanting features. Trying to please people makes things worse I did nothing but fight fires for the next couple months.ĭespite the bugs though, StreamToMe continued to sell. A handful of other issues in my hasty release led to 2000 support emails in single day. The result was a blessing and a disaster.īugs in my Bonjour handling for the iPad release meant that anyone on an IPv6 capable network couldn’t discover their server. A few websites picked up my announcement and sales suddenly took off. I didn’t own an iPad – nor did I have any intention of getting one – but I hastily updated StreamToMe to handle the iPad in the simulator, called it version 2.0 and defiantly announced day 1 availability on my blog. Despite the lack of features, it sold a few copies – indicating a desire for something in its space – so I added the most obviously missing features in the next couple months and it sold more copies. The first version had no thumbnails, no playlists, no ability to seek within a file. It took a week to write a prototype and about a month to prepare for release. I wrote the first version of StreamToMe in June 2009, shortly after Apple announced HTTP Live Streaming at WWDC. StreamToMe had low overheads, low latency, highly robust seeking and support for weird formats and was better at music and photo handling than the more video-focussed players. StreamToMe + ServeToMe competed with AirVideo, Plex, AirMediaCenter and numerous others that also implement Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming for personal media streaming. The ServeToMe server performed live transcoding (conversion to the required format) or live remuxing (moving to the streaming container without transcoding) as needed, including bitrate changes to support variable network conditions. StreamToMe relied on a lightweight streaming server, named ServeToMe, to stream media from the user’s computer to the device in Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming format over the local network or internet. Some StreamToMe promotional screenshots from the iOS 6 era. StreamToMe was a streaming music, video and photos app for iOS and macOS that I wrote and distributed via the respective App Stores.

In more-organized news, the book I was writing with Chris Eidhof and Florian Kugler, App Architecture in Swift, launched in May and you can get the finished book from objc.io. I’ve been busy with other things and have barely touched CwlViews in that time. Predicting the future is hard: It’s been 8 months since my previous article when I said I would release CwlViews “in a few weeks”. Finally, I’ll talk about why I’ve decided to simply pull it from the store – not open source it or sell it – even though it still works for many people. I’ll talk about why I lost interest in StreamToMe and, at times, deliberately neglected my own product. This will be a discussion about what it’s like to have an app on the App Store that is financially successful but eternally problematic from a support and maintenance perspective. It’s a deeply sad experience for me – like I’ve lost a faithful pet – so I wanted to write a quick retrospective.

#IOS UPNP PLAYER MAC#

Last night, I removed my app StreamToMe from the iOS and Mac App Stores, after 9 years on sale.

Ios upnp player