
Show HN: 360° and VR Video Streaming in HTML5 Tutorial, Build a Netflix For VR - slederer
http://www.dash-player.com/blog/2016/01/vr-360-video-next-big-thing/
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untog
Does this work on an iPhone? I was playing around with in-browser 360 degree
video a while back and was infuriated to find that absolutely everything I
required - WebGL, a Three.JS library, <video> tags, were present - but iPhone
Safari will only ever play videos fullscreen through tap to play, so it's
impossible to play a video through WebGL.

I really, really wish Apple would drop this restriction. Aside from anything
else, the original intention (bandwidth savings) is totally ruined by the fact
that everyone is encoding videos as (much larger) animated GIFs to get around
the restriction. How about letting videos autoplay, but silently, and have
"tap for sound"? Either that or disable autoplaying of GIFs, because the
current situation doesn't really make sense.

~~~
joshkpeterson
Android Chrome as well requires user input (usually a tap) to play videos. So
a less drastic change would for iOS to do the same, not just let videos
autoplay.

Also, if you want to use the web audio API to control the volume of videos
like this, there's a known issue that prevents you from doing that on Android
Chrome if you source the audio from a <video>.

~~~
saspiesas
It's also worth noting that this is a direction I see mobile browsers heading
in, not a restriction that may disappear at one point.

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shiftpgdn
Am I alone in getting aggravated by people considering 360 video VR? If you
want proper VR you need stereo display of 360 video. I feel like the lack of
stereoscopic video being called VR is poisoning the well for layman.

~~~
untog
It is possible to do stereo display of 360 video in the browser - you just
need Google Cardboard or similar to allow users to view it.

~~~
StavrosK
How? I've never seen a stereo 360 video before. How do you avoid the camera
recording itself?

~~~
sorenjan
You use a bunch of cameras, calculate a depthmap, and use the spherical video
and the depthmap to apply parallax, like this [0, 1] but spherical. It's a
kind of faked stereo video.

Google Jump is one such camera jig that use 16 cameras [2].

[0] [http://depthy.me/](http://depthy.me/) [1]
[http://www.scalari.net/2008/04/22/generating-stereoscopic-
im...](http://www.scalari.net/2008/04/22/generating-stereoscopic-images-with-
parallax-occlusion-mapping/) [2]
[https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/](https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/jump/)

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vrmaster
Please check vrapp.co/whitehouse to tesr our vr video in the browser solution.
For ios choose add to homescreen

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kweks
Slightly OT, but I have been looking for a live streaming / transcoded
solution.

IE, webcam in, and streaming video out that _doesn 't_ use FMS/Flash/etc. Is
it possible in HTML5 yet? Dash seems promising - but is there a totally OSS
solution available ?

~~~
w-ll
In the web, I'm using

Video.js
[https://github.com/videojs/video.js](https://github.com/videojs/video.js)
with HLS.js
[https://github.com/dailymotion/hls.js](https://github.com/dailymotion/hls.js)

for a streaming video project. Works great!

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corysama
/r/oculus and especially /r/VRFilm would also be interested in this :)

~~~
slederer
cool! I'll post it there as well

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tzm
demo: [http://www.dash-player.com/demo/adaptive-vr-360-video-
html5-...](http://www.dash-player.com/demo/adaptive-vr-360-video-html5-demo/)

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slederer
We would be curious on your feedback on this, so please be brutally honest ;-)

~~~
reimertz
This is really cool, but still lacks IOS-support, right?

I was developing the app for differentperspectiv.es, and quickly realized that
the easiest way for me to get 360-degree video support on multi platforms was
to build an Unity app and project movies on sphere-shaped textures.

This project seems cool, but would love to see the HTML5 player being open-
sourced.

~~~
moron4hire
iOS is garbage for anything VR right now. iOS' version of Webkit is the
Internet Explorer 5 of our times.

~~~
dsp1234
Fun fact, IE 2 included support for VRML, the virtual reality modeling
language, back in 1996.

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LCDninja
Very cool... interesting to see Hacker news picking up stories on VR with
increasing frequency... Here's to hoping VR is the next boom! Best of luck!

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rocky1138
How is this any different than 360 videos on YouTube?

~~~
slederer
With this you can host your own 360° videos, and don't need YouTube. This is
in particular interesting if you want to monetize by your own, e.g., through
ads or subscription. It's basically the infrastructure you need to build
Netflix-like services.

~~~
DarkLinkXXXX
I'm pretty sure you can't host it yourself. If you want to use their
framework, I'm pretty sure you have to host it through them. At least, I can't
find a download link anywhere.

~~~
slederer
yes, you can download the video assets after encoding + download the player
for self-hosting

