Uploading Video with iPhone

Question

Is it possible to upload video to a server? I know that images are possible. If someone can just point me in the right direction that would be awesome.

Thanks

Answer 1

Edited Aug 2015

This answer is now seriously out of date. At the time of writing there weren't to many options and videos were relatively small in size. If you are looking at doing this now, I would use AFNetworking which makes this much simpler. It will stream the upload from file rather than holding it all in memory, and also supports the new Apple background upload Task.

Docs here: https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking#creating-an-upload-task

--

Yes this is possible and this is how i went about it.

Implement the following function which runs when the media picker is finished.

- (NSData *)generatePostDataForData:(NSData *)uploadData
{
    // Generate the post header:
    NSString *post = [NSString stringWithCString:"--AaB03x
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="upload[file]"; filename="somefile"
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary

" encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];

    // Get the post header int ASCII format:
    NSData *postHeaderData = [post dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding allowLossyConversion:YES];

    // Generate the mutable data variable:
    NSMutableData *postData = [[NSMutableData alloc] initWithLength:[postHeaderData length] ];
    [postData setData:postHeaderData];

    // Add the image:
    [postData appendData: uploadData];

    // Add the closing boundry:
    [postData appendData: [@"
--AaB03x--" dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding allowLossyConversion:YES]];

    // Return the post data:
    return postData;
}


- (void)imagePickerController:(UIImagePickerController *)picker didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo:(NSDictionary *)info{ 

    //assign the mediatype to a string 
    NSString *mediaType = [info objectForKey:UIImagePickerControllerMediaType];

    //check the media type string so we can determine if its a video
    if ([mediaType isEqualToString:@"public.movie"]){
        NSLog(@"got a movie");
        NSURL *videoURL = [info objectForKey:UIImagePickerControllerMediaURL];
        NSData *webData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:videoURL];
        [self post:webData];
        [webData release];

    }

for the post function i had something like this which i got from somewhere else (sorry i dont know where i found it):

- (void)post:(NSData *)fileData
{

    NSLog(@"POSTING");

    // Generate the postdata:
    NSData *postData = [self generatePostDataForData: fileData];
    NSString *postLength = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", [postData length]];

    // Setup the request:
    NSMutableURLRequest *uploadRequest = [[[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.example.com:3000/"] cachePolicy: NSURLRequestReloadIgnoringLocalCacheData timeoutInterval: 30 ] autorelease];
    [uploadRequest setHTTPMethod:@"POST"];
    [uploadRequest setValue:postLength forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Length"];
    [uploadRequest setValue:@"multipart/form-data; boundary=AaB03x" forHTTPHeaderField:@"Content-Type"];
    [uploadRequest setHTTPBody:postData];

    // Execute the reqest:
    NSURLConnection *conn=[[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:uploadRequest delegate:self];
    if (conn)
    {
        // Connection succeeded (even if a 404 or other non-200 range was returned).
        NSLog(@"sucess");
        UIAlertView *alert = [[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:@"Got Server Response" message:@"Success" delegate:nil cancelButtonTitle:@"OK" otherButtonTitles:nil];
        [alert show];
        [alert release];
    }
    else
    {
        // Connection failed (cannot reach server).
        NSLog(@"fail");
    }

}

The above snippet builds the http post request and submits it. You will need to modify it if you want decent error handling and consider using a library that allows async upload (theres one on github)

Also Notice the port :3000 on the server url above, I found it easy for bug testing to start a rails server on its default port 3000 in development mode so i could see the request parameters for debugging purposes

Hope this helps