I am not looking for an API for video calling here. I know about some APIs like OpenTok.
But I want to create my own methods to make a video calling app.
How can I start on this? I have good knowledge of JSON and SOAP services and I have done some work on streaming in my past, will that help me?
It's really challenging. First iOS haven't a specific API to stream audio+video through the internet. The main issue here is that with AVFoundation you can capture single frames, but sending them without compression it will be really painfull even for a wifi connection or for the server. To compress a video you can use CPU but this will require intense operations that will drain battery and heat you device. There is way to compress video using a specific chip on iPhone, but it is used only if you write on the device using AVAssetWriter class.
There are some useful question on stack about it such as this
If you want to create your own methods to make a video calling app, a good starting point would be to look at AVFoundation's Media Capture.
After that, you'll need to find a way to read and write bytes to and from the devices. You can test this with ad hoc build (TCP server).
Set up a server so it can act like a proxy for the devices to talk to each other.
