HTTP Live streaming to Apple iPhone/iPad on a MAC

These are instructions to quickly setup HTTP Live streaming on a MAC. You will be able to serve the contents of a Media folder, or remote streams (eg. dreambox) via a web interface.

Pre-requisites:
- MAC running 10.6
- VLC installed. I used 1.0.5
- Admin access to the MAC.


Steps:

1. Download the tar ball http_streaming.tgz
2. Open a terminal window
3. Untar
tar xzvf http_streaming.tgz
4. Edit index.php and change the variables $mediapath to where your movie files are, and $user to your username. Save the changes
5. Launch the installer:
sudo ./stream_install.sh

(Optionally you can do sudo ./stream_install.sh -f to overwrite previous installation)

The installer script will do the following:
- Enable php
- Start the web server
- Copy the files to /Library/WebServer/Documents/stream and /usr/local/bin
- Add permission for the _www user to execute /bin/ls and /usr/local/bin/stream.pl scripts
- Launch Safari pointing to the new setup

The initial screen will display all media files in the $media directory as links.
Clicking on the links will start a VLC transcoding process in the background, and redirect the browser to the HTTP live stream

For remote media source, include the URL in a file with suffix .url in the media directory.
Eg. my dreambox is specified in dreambox.url as:

http://dreambox:31344

Where dreambox is the hostname/ipaddress and 31344 is the streaming port

From iPad/iPhone, point Safari to http://<Mac_Hostname_or_Address/stream

Click here to download:
http_streaming.tgz (2 KB)