Hello, I'm Soonwon. We’re currently developing a UVC camera device and trying to stream MJPEG video via AVFoundation on macOS. However, we’re running into a problem with custom resolutions. When we try to use AVFoundation on macOS to capture MJPEG video at 1000x6000, the stream is not accepted or simply doesn’t work. Lower resolutions work fine. (Interestingly, using the same device on iPadOS, we can capture the 1000x6000 MJPEG stream successfully by using AVCaptureSessionPresetInputPriority.) Is there any way to receive custom-resolution MJPEG streams (like 1000x6000) from a UVC device using AVFoundation on macOS? Are there specific session presets, entitlements, or known limitations that affect MJPEG handling at custom resolutions on macOS? Does macOS handle MJPEG differently from iPadOS in AVFoundation? Any insight or guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you! NSError *error = nil; if ([selectedDevice lockForConfiguration:&error]) { [session beginConfiguration]; session.sessionPreset = AVCaptureSessionPresetHigh; bool foundFormat = false; for (AVCaptureDeviceFormat *format in selectedDevice.formats) { CMVideoDimensions dims = CMVideoFormatDescriptionGetDimensions(format.formatDescription); FourCharCode pixelFormat = CMFormatDescriptionGetMediaSubType(format.formatDescription); foundFormat = true; if (dims.width == 1000 && dims.height == 6000) { selectedDevice.activeFormat = format; foundFormat = true; break; } } if(foundFormat == false) { NSLog(@"Failed to foundFormat : "); [session commitConfiguration]; return false; } NSError* error = nil; AVCaptureDeviceInput* input = [AVCaptureDeviceInput deviceInputWithDevice:selectedDevice error:&error]; if (error || ![session canAddInput:input]) { NSLog(@"Failed to add video input: %@", error.localizedDescription); [session commitConfiguration]; return false; } [session addInput:input]; AVCaptureVideoDataOutput* output = [[AVCaptureVideoDataOutput alloc] init]; output.alwaysDiscardsLateVideoFrames = YES; output.videoSettings = @{ (NSString*)kCVPixelBufferPixelFormatTypeKey : @(kCVPixelFormatType_420YpCbCr8BiPlanarVideoRange) }; [output setSampleBufferDelegate:delegate queue:queue]; if ([session canAddOutput:output]) { [session addOutput:output]; } [session commitConfiguration]; [selectedDevice unlockForConfiguration]; } else { NSLog(@"Failed to lock device for configuration: %@", error.localizedDescription); } // start~

I'm working on an app where a user needs to select a video from their Photos library, and I need to get the original, unmodified HEVC (H.265) data stream to preserve its encoding. The Problem I have confirmed that my source videos are HEVC. I can record a new video with my iPhone 15 Pro Max camera set to "High Efficiency," export the "Unmodified Original" from Photos on my Mac, and verify that the codec is MPEG-H Part2/HEVC (H.265). However, when I select that exact same video in my app using PHPickerViewController, the itemProvider does not list public.hevc as an available type identifier. This forces me to fall back to a generic movie type, which results in the system providing me with a transcoded H.264 version of the video. Here is the debug output from my app after selecting a known HEVC video: ⚠️ 'public.hevc' not found. Falling back to generic movie type (likely H.264). What I've Tried My code explicitly checks for the public.hevc identifier in the registeredTypeIdentifiers array. Since it's not found, my HEVC-specific logic is never triggered. Here is a minimal version of my PHPickerViewControllerDelegate implementation: import UniformTypeIdentifiers // ... inside the Coordinator class ... func picker(_ picker: PHPickerViewController, didFinishPicking results: [PHPickerResult]) { picker.dismiss(animated: true) guard let result = results.first else { return } let itemProvider = result.itemProvider let hevcIdentifier = "public.hevc" let identifiers = itemProvider.registeredTypeIdentifiers print("Available formats from itemProvider: \(identifiers)") if identifiers.contains(hevcIdentifier) { print("✅ HEVC format found, requesting raw data...") itemProvider.loadDataRepresentation(forTypeIdentifier: hevcIdentifier) { (data, error) in // ... process H.265 data ... } } else { print("⚠️ 'public.hevc' not found. Falling back to generic movie type (likely H.264).") itemProvider.loadFileRepresentation(forTypeIdentifier: UTType.movie.identifier) { url, error in // ... process H.264 fallback ... } } } My Environment Device: iPhone 15 Pro Max iOS Version: iOS 18.5 Xcode Version: 16.2 My Questions Are there specific conditions (e.g., the video being HDR/Dolby Vision, Cinematic, or stored in iCloud) under which PHPickerViewController's itemProvider would intentionally not offer the public.hevc type identifier, even for an HEVC video? What is the definitive, recommended API sequence to guarantee that I receive the original, unmodified data stream for a video asset, ensuring that no transcoding to H.264 occurs during the process? Any insight into why public.hevc might be missing from the registeredTypeIdentifiers for a known HEVC asset would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I'm working on a media app that would like to be able to tell if the TV connected to tvOS is running at 59.94hz or 60.00hz, so it can optimize a video stream. It looks like the best I can currently do is to check if the user has Match Content Rate enabled, and based on that, when calling displayManager.preferredDisplayCriteria to change video modes, I could guess which rate their TV might be in. It's not very ideal, because not all TVs support both of these rates, and my request for 59.94 might end up as 60 and vice versa. I dug around and can't find any available method in UIScreen to get this info. The odd thing is, the data is right there in currentMode when I look in the debugger, but it seems to be in a private or undocumented class. Is there any way to get at it?

Hello, I'm trying to subscribe to AVPlayerItem status updates using Combine and it's bridge to Swift Concurrency – .values. This is my sample code. struct ContentView: View { @State var player: AVPlayer? @State var loaded = false var body: some View { VStack { if let player { Text("loading status: \(loaded)") Spacer() VideoPlayer(player: player) Button("Load") { Task { let item = AVPlayerItem( url: URL(string: "https://sample-videos.com/video321/mp4/360/big_buck_bunny_360p_5mb.mp4")! ) player.replaceCurrentItem(with: item) let publisher = player.publisher(for: \.status) for await status in publisher.values { print(status.rawValue) if status == .readyToPlay { loaded = true break } } print("we are out") } } } else { Text("No video selected") } } .task { player = AVPlayer() } } } After I click on the "load" button it prints out 0 (as the initial status of .unknown) and nothing after – even when the video is fully loaded. At the same time this works as expected (loading status is set to true): struct ContentView: View { @State var player: AVPlayer? @State var loaded = false @State var cancellable: AnyCancellable? var body: some View { VStack { if let player { Text("loading status: \(loaded)") Spacer() VideoPlayer(player: player) Button("Load") { Task { let item = AVPlayerItem( url: URL(string: "https://sample-videos.com/video321/mp4/360/big_buck_bunny_360p_5mb.mp4")! ) player.replaceCurrentItem(with: item) let stream = AsyncStream { continuation in cancellable = item.publisher(for: \.status) .sink { if $0 == .readyToPlay { continuation.yield($0) continuation.finish() } } } for await _ in stream { loaded = true cancellable?.cancel() cancellable = nil break } } } } else { Text("No video selected") } } .task { player = AVPlayer() } } } Is this a bug or something?

I'm seeking to a specific sync frame in a video file (HEVC, recorded on iPad). When I feed the buffers from that sync frame on to VTDecompressionSession it consistently drops the 2.,3.,4. buffer with a kVTVideoDecoderReferenceMissingErr (or no error but no buffer on the simulator). If I feed all the buffers from the penultimate sync frame prior to the desired frame the buffers come out fine but that would just create a massive overhead to always do it. Tried multiple OS versions, devices etc. Seems a consistent problem. Here's a sample project with the offending video (disregard memory handling etc): https://github.com/marcuseckert/vtSample I've filed a radar FB18228296 but would appreciate any feedback on circumventing or at least detecting this behavior prior to decoding.

I have beet taking images from the iOS video camera feed and have encountered an issue. When you take images form the wideCamera this consumes about half the phone's CPU. The same is not the case when you take images from the telephotoCamera video stream. Is there a way of disabling the extra processing that is being done?

Hi All. I'm working on Single-Sign-On feature in my application to let customers sign into their TV Provider. I need to add Video Subscriber SSO entitlement (com.apple.developer.video-subscriber-single-sign-on) to the app, but I found out that it's a special entitlement, need to contact Apple to enable it for my Apple account. On https://developer.apple.com/account I navigated to Support -> Contact Us -> Development and Technical -> Entitlements and ask in the email about missing entitlement (ticket ID 102478794279). The support team couldn't help me, they redirected me to the operations team. I've been waiting for a few months now but they inform me to keep waiting. Is there a better way to contact Apple and get Video Subscriber SSO entitlement in an efficient way?

I use replaykit for system-level screen recording. I want to determine whether the screen is in landscape mode by calling back CMSamplebuffer, but CMSamplebuffer does not come with this information. The other several apis related to obtaining the screen orientation are also restricted by the background. I want to know whether the information of the screen rotation direction can be obtained in real time in the background

Does anyone have a template of an Apple Projected Media Profile Format Description or a File of a Stereo wideFOV video? Use case I have 2 compatible cameras that I stereo sync and I want to move the projection information from the compatible video to the Spatial video that combines them. Every version I can come up with crashes the AVP and when viewing as Spatial in Tahoe I just get a black screen.

I'm currently using ReplayKit for background screen recording, but I can't determine whether the screen is in landscape mode from the CMSampleBuffer. All other APIs for detecting screen orientation are foreground-based. What should I do?

When I play an HDR video in the iPhone Photos app, I can see the HDR effect obviously. But if this HDR video is played continuously for more than 30-40 minutes, the HDR effect will disappear and the brightness will be compressed to the SDR range. This issue will appear on any iPhone. Depending on the phone, it may be 20-30 minutes, or 30-40 minutes, or even a few minutes, such as iPhone 12 mini. Similarly, if I use AVPlayer to play and preview an HDR video, if it plays more than 30-40 minutes, the HDR effect will disappear and the screen brightness will dim. Also the currentEDRHeadroom will gradually decrease to 1 Note, test it with an HDR video longer than 1 hour, and if the video is short, please loop it. My question is how to avoid losing the HDR effect after 30-40 minutes when I use CAMetalLayer to render any HDR video.

In Final Cut Pro, keyframes for transform parameters (such as Position, Scale, and Rotation) are automatically set to “Smooth” interpolation. This often results in undesired easing between keyframes, especially when linear motion is required. Currently, we have to manually adjust each keyframe to "Linear" using the Video Animation Editor, which can be time-consuming when working with many keyframes. Would it be possible to add an option to set the default keyframe interpolation to "Linear"—either globally in Preferences or per parameter in the Inspector? This would greatly streamline the animation workflow for many editors. Thank you for considering this request!

Is there any way we can detect the status of the Show When Muted and Show on Skip Back device settings in code ?

I’m using ScreenCaptureKit on macOS to grab frames and measure end-to-end latency (capture → my delegate callback). For each CMSampleBuffer I read: let pts = CMSampleBufferGetPresentationTimeStamp(sampleBuffer).seconds to get the “capture” timestamp, and I also extract the mach-absolute display time: let attachments = CMSampleBufferGetSampleAttachmentsArray(sampleBuffer, createIfNecessary: false) as? [[SCStreamFrameInfo: Any]] let displayMach = attachments?.first?[.displayTime] as? UInt64 // convert mach ticks to seconds... Then I compare both against the current time: let now = CACurrentMediaTime() let latencyFromPTS = now - pts let latencyFromDisplay = now - displayTimeSeconds But I consistently see negative values for both calculations—i.e. the PTS or displayTime often end up numerically larger than now. This suggests that the “presentation timestamp” and the mach-absolute display time are coming from a different epoch or clock domain than CACurrentMediaTime(). Questions: Which clocks/epochs does ScreenCaptureKit use for PTS and for .displayTime? How can I align these timestamps with CACurrentMediaTime() so that now - pts and now - displayTime reliably yield non-negative real-world latencies? Any pointers on the correct clock conversions or APIs to use would be greatly appreciated.

Hello, I need to enumerate built-in media devices (cameras, microphones, etc.). For this purpose, I am using the CoreAudio and CoreMediaIO frameworks. According to the table 'Daemon-Safe Frameworks' in Apple’s TN2083, CoreAudio is daemon-safe. However, the documentation does not mention CoreMediaIO. Can CoreMediaIO be used in a daemon? If not, are there any documented alternatives to detect built-in cameras in a daemon (e.g., via device classes in IOKit)? Thank you in advance, Pavel

I’m building a SwiftUI app whose primary job is to play audio. I manage all of the Now-Playing metadata and Command center manually via the available shared instances: MPRemoteCommandCenter.shared() MPNowPlayingInfoCenter.default().nowPlayingInfo In certain parts of the app I also need to display videos, but as soon as I attach another AVPlayer, it automatically pushes its own metadata into the Control Center and overwrites my audio info. What I need: a way to show video inline without ever having that video player update the system’s Now-Playing info (or Control Center). In my app, I start by configuring the shared audio session do { try AVAudioSession.sharedInstance().setCategory(.playback, mode: .default, options: [ .allowAirPlay, .allowBluetoothA2DP ]) try AVAudioSession.sharedInstance().setActive(true) } catch { NSLog("%@", "**** Failed to set up AVAudioSession \(error.localizedDescription)") } and then set the MPRemoteCommandCenter commands and MPNowPlayingInfoCenter nowPlayingInfo like mentioned above. All this works without any issues as long as I only have one AVPlayer in my app. But when I add other AVPlayers to display some videos (and keep the main AVPlayer for the sound) they push undesired updates to MPNowPlayingInfoCenter: struct VideoCardView: View { @State private var player: AVPlayer let videoName: String init(player: AVPlayer = AVPlayer(), videoName: String) { self.player = player self.videoName = videoName guard let path = Bundle.main.path(forResource: videoName, ofType: nil) else { return } let url = URL(fileURLWithPath: path) let item = AVPlayerItem(url: url) self.player.replaceCurrentItem(with: item) } var body: some View { VideoPlayer(player: player) .aspectRatio(contentMode: .fill) .onAppear { player.isMuted = true player.allowsExternalPlayback = false player.actionAtItemEnd = .none player.play() MPNowPlayingInfoCenter.default().nowPlayingInfo = nil MPNowPlayingInfoCenter.default().playbackState = .stopped NotificationCenter.default.addObserver(forName: .AVPlayerItemDidPlayToEndTime, object: player.currentItem, queue: .main) { notification in guard let finishedItem = notification.object as? AVPlayerItem, finishedItem === player.currentItem else { return } player.seek(to: .zero) player.play() } } .onDisappear { player.pause() } } } Which is why I tried adding: MPNowPlayingInfoCenter.default().nowPlayingInfo = nil MPNowPlayingInfoCenter.default().playbackState = .stopped // or .interrupted, .unknown But that didn't work. I also tried making a wrapper around the AVPlayerViewController in order to set updatesNowPlayingInfoCenter to false, but that didn’t work either: struct CustomAVPlayerView: UIViewControllerRepresentable { let player: AVPlayer func makeUIViewController(context: Context) -> AVPlayerViewController { let vc = AVPlayerViewController() vc.player = player vc.updatesNowPlayingInfoCenter = false vc.showsPlaybackControls = false return vc } func updateUIViewController(_ controller: AVPlayerViewController, context: Context) { controller.player = player } } Hence any help on how to embed video in SwiftUI without its AVPlayer touching MPNowPlayingInfoCenter would be greatly appreciated. All this was tested on an actual device with iOS 18.4.1, and built with Xcode 16.2 on macOS 15.5

I am currently developing an HEVC player using VideoToolbox on an iOS device. I have successfully created an HEVC decoder that receives HEVC streams from our custom image capture and encoding device, and it can decode and display images properly. However, when my image capture and encoding device configures the encoder to output HEVC streams with ​​fragmented NALUs​​ (i.e., an I-frame or P-frame is split and stored across multiple slice NALUs), the iOS decoder can be initialized successfully but fails to decode and output images. ​​Can VideoToolbox properly decode HEVC bitstreams when a single frame is split into multiple slice NALUs?​​ Key Observations: ​​1. Single-NALU frames​​ work fine. ​​2. Multi-NALU frames​​ (sliced I/P-frames) cause decoding failure. 3. The decoder session is created successfully (VTDecompressionSessionCreate returns no error).

My app allows users to capture and save videos to the Photos app using the following Swift code: PHPhotoLibrary.shared().performChanges { PHAssetChangeRequest.creationRequestForAssetFromVideo(atFileURL: fileURL) } completionHandler: { success, error in Videos are successfully saved to Photos and play correctly. However, users report that when they AirDrop these videos from the Photos app to another device (e.g., iPad to iPhone), the videos are saved in the Files app on the receiving device instead of the Photos app. This issue is more common with higher-resolution videos, such as 2K, recorded in HEVC format at 30 fps. I wasn't able to reproduce the issue locally. I've found a thread in public apple forum: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255276865?sortBy=rank but I wonder maybe there are some special flags that I should clear or add to my videos (e.g. PHAssetChangeRequest)? Thank you!

Starting in iOS 18.4, (and still in the iOS 18.5 beta), the AVPlayer seems to freeze when we: Replace the current AVPlayerItem, ReplaceCurrentItemWithPlayerItem and then: Call Seek very shortly afterwards (seekToTime:toleranceBefore:toleranceAfter: / seek(to:)) And then subsequent calls to play after have no effect. However, it feels scrubbing to see after works and also changing the playback rate (i.e. fast forward) tends to clear up the frozen state. Our primary workflow involves video playback, replacing video to show new clips and in some cases seeking to specific frames. This appears to only be occurring while streaming video, reports are all that local downloaded video playback remains fine. This same code path has worked without issue on 17.x and 18.3.2 and for years before that. What is particularly strange is that time observers log that video is still playing or feeding frames. The reported status is ReadyToPlay, IsLikelyToKeepUp is true, and there are no indications of stalling or buffering. A similar issue is true for our web application in Safari. While on Sonoma and Safari 17.x, there is no issue. When you update to macOS Sequoia 15.4.1 and Safari 18.4, you begin observing a similar freezing. The same does not occur on Chrome or other tested browsers. There appears to be in the release notes for Safari 18.4, an interesting "fix" note that seems similar to what we are now experiencing: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-notes/safari-18_4-release-notes "Fixed an issue where playback doesn’t always resume after a seek. (140097993)" "Fixed playing video generating non-monotonic ‘timeupdate’ events. (142275184) (FB16222910)" "Fixed websites calling play() during a seek() is allowed by the specification so that the play event is fired even if the seek hasn’t completed. (142517488)" "Fixed seek not completing for WebM under some circumstances. (143372794)" "Fixed MediaRecorderPrivateEncoder writing frames out of order. (143956063)"

Movies taken with Android phones store their location metadata (and probably others) in ways that are ignored by Apple's ecosystem (QuickTime Player, Photos.app). I am considering creating a Spotlight importer so that this metadata is available to the sytem. But I have a couple of questions: Can a Spotlight importer add new data (like location) to the data that the standard importer already captured? Or would the new importer need to take over the whole data gathering? If so, would macOS allow that? Would that Spotlight importer be somehow used by e.g. Photos.app and QT Player to capture the location? Or would this end up in Spotlight "knowing" the location but Photos.app ignoring it? If so, maybe there is something more broadly useful than a Spotlight importer?