Video Q&A

In our app, users select many videos (10–100+) that we upload to our server in one batch. Two problems compound each other: Backgrounding: Users almost always leave the app while the batch is in flight. Uploads started with a regular URLSession get suspended. Pre-upload transcoding: To reduce upload duration and cellular data usage, we downscale/re-encode each video (via AVAssetExportSession) before upload. This is resource-intensive and unlike a background URLSession upload task can't continue once the app is suspended, so the pipeline stalls even if the uploads themselves could continue. What's Apple's recommended design here? Is the intended pattern a background URLSession with file-based upload tasks, fed by a BGProcessingTask that drains the transcode queue opportunistically? Are there APIs we're missing, e.g. AVAssetExportSession's background-friendly options, HEVC/preferredTranscoding export presets that are cheaper, or any way to get extended runtime for the encode step (beginBackgroundTask budgets seem too short for dozens of videos)? And is there guidance on the trade-off of just uploading originals and transcoding server-side instead?

These are follow up questions for: https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/feedback/22779473 For a large AVQueuePlayer queue (50-100+ HLS items), does AVFoundation guarantee it only allocates video decode sessions for the active and next item? Our profiling suggests this is the case, but we want to confirm whether we can rely on this behavior or if we should implement an application-side sliding window to limit concurrent decoders.

Today we are on-boarded to using CMCD data to allow us to get more diagnostic data of our streaming. We would like to have the ability to upload our own custom headers, this is supported on other players, but not supported on AVPlayer. The workaround today that works is adding in custom query parameters then querying based on that, but we would like support explicitly in the headers.