The iPhone's video capability is extremely limited. I talked to someone recently who was trying to stream video to the iPhone. The main issue is that the inte

The iPhone's video capability is extremely limited. I talked to someone recently who was trying to stream video to the iPhone. The main issue is that the internal video decoding API is not open, so you can't arbitrarily open it up from an iPhone application and pass in a video stream to be decoded. You can only open it on a full file. One of the problems with this is streaming video. You can do video downloads a'la Youtube, but that's because those fit the model: they are mp4 files with a header atom at the front containing index information for the entire file. You can't do this in live streaming, for obvious reasons. The guy I had talked to basically concluded that it was impossible to view a live video stream on the iPod with an ordinary application, since Apple's API was closed and the built-in ARM CPU was an order of magnitude too slow to do the video decoding on its own with a custom decoder rather than using the built-in decoder chip.