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I am working on the experimental project that need to connect external video camera to iPhone.

I found out that we can connect iPhone to external interface like Arduino using redpark cable that ship together with SDK. But I am not sure how iOS handle the raw data taken from the external camera.

I am wondering if AVFoundation can handle this part because we can specify the input device. But I am not sure how to point it to external device.

Or is there any other frameworks that can handle this task?

I am looking for tutorial or sample project that I can learn more about this.

sooon
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  • A data (most of in bytes) is received by device, that's it. You can convert this data to image in iOS. Crucial part is how to receive data from external video camera. – Kampai Dec 19 '14 at 06:59
  • `AVFoundation` have `AVCaptureDevice` class seems to be able to handle what I want. But currently there are not much reference material for me to look into. – sooon Dec 19 '14 at 08:43
  • The cable you link to allows data rates up to 115.2Kbps. This is very low for video. You might get away with 640x480px 30fps with heavy h.264 compression. You will be limited in the type of camera which you can use. – alexkent Dec 19 '14 at 23:30
  • @alexkent That is so far what I can find from the net. Is there any other solution that I can use? At the moment I cannot go for MFI program because it is the first stage of prototype. – sooon Dec 20 '14 at 03:27
  • 802.11n / ac (wifi) is the typical solution to connecting external video cameras to iOS devices. See products by Teradek, for example. Wifi gives you pretty good data rates and wireless at the cost of having more work done camera side. – alexkent Dec 23 '14 at 22:13

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The decoding you need to do depends entirely on the camera you will use. But, given the data rate limitation of the serial cable you are considering, you will be practically limited to using a camera that can provide a low bit rate h.264 stream.

Decoding such a stream can be done with the ffmpeg library. Instructions for integrating it in an iOS project can be found in this SO question.

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alexkent
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