I have been trying to find a way to play live stream of audio (mp3) using Google Actions but haven't found a way to do so.
I tried Media Response as well but as mentioned in the documentation it doesn't support live stream.
I followed this thread but it doesn't have any examples to help me with.
Is it possible to play live mp3 stream using Google Actions?
I've had relatively good results with the Media Player being able to handle mp3 "streams". There are a couple of problems doing this, however:
There is a time limit on the audio playback (4 hours last time I checked, but it may have changed).
There isn't any such thing as an mp3 "stream". The player treats it as a single mp3 file that it downloads in chunks using HTTP headers, unlike some of the streaming protocols that allow for varying bitrate based on network and other conditions.
If this is an issue, one alternative might be to use the Interactive Canvas (which uses Chrome on the device) to present an HTML page that has an <audio> tag in it that you control. This gives you a little more control (most streaming protocols are either supported or have JavaScript libraries that can do the work), but there are some downsides:
This will only work on Smart Displays and Android. Smart Speakers aren't supported.
Interactive Canvas is only allowed for certain types of Actions. Currently it must be a game, a story, or an educational Action.
Related
I have a content creation site I am building and im confused on audio and video.
If I have a content creators audio or video stored in s3 and then I want to display their file will the html video player or audio player stream the media or will it download it fully then play it?
I ask because what if the video or audio is significantly long. like 2 hours for example. I need to know how to solve the use case.
Lastly what file type is most acceptable for viewing on webpages? It seems like MPEG-4 is the best bet. Is that true?
Most video player clients and browsers will attempt to stream the video if they can.
For an mp4 video file hosted on a server, so long as the header is at the start and the server accepts range requests, this will mean the player downloads the video in chunks and starts playing as soon as it has enough to decide the first frames.
For more professional streaming services, they will generally use an adaptive bit rate streaming protocol like DASH or HLS (see this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42365034/334402) and again the video will be streamed in chunks, or segments, and will start playing while it is streaming.
To answer your last question you need to be aware that the raw video is encoded (e.g. h.264, VP9 etc) and the video, audio, subtitle etc tracks stored in a video container (e.g. mp4, Web etc).
The most common format is probaly h.264 encoded and mp4 containers at this time.
The particular profile for h.264 can matter also depending on the device - baseline is probably the most supported profile at this time. You can find examples of media support for different devices online, e.g. for Android: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/media-formats
#Mick's answer is spot on. I'll just add that mp4 (with h264 encoding) will work in just about every browser out there.
The issue with mp4 files (especially with a 2 hour long movie) isn't so much the seeking & streaming. If your creator creates a 4K video - thats what you'll deliver to everyone (even mobile phones). HLS streaming on the other hand has adaptive bitrates - where the video adapts to both the screen & the available network speeds. You'll get better playback results with less buffering (and if you're using AWS - a LOT LESS data egress) with video streaming.
(there are a bunch of APIs and services that can help you do this - including api.video (where I work), Mux and others).
Preconditions:
Developing an audio player for a web application.
All target browsers fully support audio tag.
No need in sprites, multiple simultaneous sounds etc, just one audio track to be played back at a moment.
Audio file has to be streamed from the server, not downloaded at once. Therefore not Web Audio API.
Why would I want to utilize howler.js or similar library instead of relying on the built-in audio tag in this scenario?
The only howler.js feature that is intriguing is “Handles edge cases and bugs across environments”.
Do any of you, know a way to get the audio stream of a music platform and plug it to the Web Audio API ?
I am doing a music visualizer based on the Web Audio API. It currently reads sounds from the mic of my computer and process a real-time visualization. If I play music loud enough, my viz works !
But now I'd like to move on and only read the sound coming from my computer, so that the visualization render only to the music and no other sound such as people chatting.
I know I can buffer MP3 file in that API and it would work perfectly. But in 2020, streaming music is very common, via Deezer, Spotify, Souncloud etc.
I know they all have an API but they often offer an SDK where you cannot really do more than "play" music. There is no easy access to the stream of audio data. Maybe I am wrong and that is why I ask your help.
Thanks
The way to stream music to WebAudio is to use a MediaElementAudioSourceNode or MediaStreamAudioSourceNode. However, these nodes will output zero unless you're allowed to access the data. This means you have to set the CORS property correctly on your end and also requires the server to allow the access through CORS.
A google search will help with setting up CORS. But many sites won't allow access unless you have the right permissions. Then you are out of luck.
I find a "no-code" work around. At least on Ubuntu 18.04, I am able to tell Firefox to take my speakers as the "microphone input".
You just have to select the good "mic" in the list when your browser asks for mic permission.
That solution is very convenient since I do not need to write platform-specific binding-code to access to the audio stream
Right now my goal is to grab a streaming video from an IP surveillance camera and display it on a web page.
The camera allows to encode the streaming either in h264 or mjpeg, and transmits it by the RTSP protocol.
The streaming has to be available for several kinds of devices (mainly computers, android smartphones and iphones).
According to my findings it seems like the best option for doing that (in terms of latency) is to transmit the frames of the video through a websocket:
http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/09/html5-live-video-streaming-via-websockets.
Almost all the implementations of this mechanism I've found are based on mjpeg since it's easier to get the video frames.
There's also a h264 player: https://github.com/131/h264-live-player, based on https://github.com/mbebenita/Broadway, which I didn't manage to run ( I would appreciate any help in that respect).
Now the first question is: it is worth trying to work with h264 (since it saves a lot of bandwidth). Or would the h264 decode process probably introduce too much latency?
I would also like to ask if anyone knows a better solution that the one I'm trying to implement.
Finally, where I say "additional information" I mean that I might want to include some additional data associated with some video frames. (something like subtitles or telemetry data).
I have a large amount of audio stored on my web server in a very custom format that can't be replayed by anything other than my own application. That application is a Win32 app that can connect to my web server and stream and replay that audio.
I'd really like to be able to do the streaming and replaying from within a browser, but don't know where to start. Ideally I'd like the technology to be cross-platform (unlike my current Win32 app) and cross-browser (IE 6 and above and Firefox).
My current thoughts are to look at things like:
Flash, but doesn't that only replay mp3 audio?
Java, are VMs freely available still?
Converting the audio to a WAV file on the web server and then using someone else's plugin to replay that file. I'd rather keep the conversion off the web server for performance reasons, but is still an option.
Writing my own custom plugin to do the complete stream and replay operation.
Any guidance would be most useful.
Please note that the audio is not music and that simply converting to another audio format is not trivial. The audio that is stored also changes frequently (every minute) would need constant conversion.
Why are you using a proprietary music format? I'd probably not even bother downloading a program to listen to it.
I would suggest you convert it to mp3 and then use flash.
Building your own plugin would probably be hard, there are so many different platforms you'd have to cater for, something like flash is written for them already.
Apart from converting server-side: Implement a decoder for your format in ActionScript or Java. Then you can write a Flash movie or Java applet that plays it. Both languages/runtimes should be fast enough to decode in realtime unless your format is very complex. Flash would be the more accessible of the two, since nearly everyone has the plugin installed. (It's possible that playing a raw sound buffer isn't supported by older Flash versions than 10, I'm no expert on that.) The Java plugin is definitely free, but you'd require the users to install it.
I'd go with converting the audio to WAV (or MP3) on the server. Writing your own cross-platform browser component would be a lot of work, thanks to the different ways the major OSes handle their audio APIs.
Try taking a look at shoutcast.
Basically its a server app that will stream music to any client that connects to it through a browser (effectively your own radio station). I've never used it myself but should be straight forward.
Another idea is winamp remote. Again you install the app on the server but this time you can browse your music collection on their website and play individual songs.