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Deep dive into the technical specifications that influence seamless playback for streaming services, including bitrates, codecs, and caching mechanisms.

Streaming Documentation

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AVPlayer HLS High Bitrate Problem on Apple TV HD (A1625) tvOS 26
Hello, We have Video Stream app. It has HLS VOD Content. We supply 1080p, 4K Contents to users. Users were watching 1080p content before tvOS 26. Users can not watch 1080p content anymore when they update to tvOS 26. We have not changed anything at HLS playlist side and application version. This problem only occurs on Apple TV 4th Gen (A1625) tvOS 26 version. There is no problem with newer Apple TV devices. Would you help to resolve problem? Thanks in advance
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Email "Updates to FairPlay Streaming Server SDK" makes no sense
Hi, While I don't normally use FairPlay, I got this email that is so strangely worded I am wondering if it makes sense to people who do know it or if it has some typo or what. You can only generate certificates for SDK 4, also SDK 4 is no longer supported? (Also "will not expire" is imprecise phrasing, certificates presumably will expire, I think it meant to say are still valid / are not invalidated.)
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Playback Issues for DRM content when sending CMCD
Since iOS and tvOS 18, CMCD can now be automatically sent by AVPlayer (https://developer.apple.com/streaming/Whats-new-HLS.pdf). However, after enabling CMCD, our streams occasionally fail with the following error: CoreMediaErrorDomain Error -17383 This issue appears to affect only DRM-protected (FairPlay) streams so far. We activate CMCD via the resource loader of an AVURLAsset, before assigning the item to an AVPlayer. Unfortunately, we haven’t found a reliable way to reproduce the issue, and we’ve been unable to gather any useful diagnostic information. Has anyone else observed this behavior when enabling CMCD on FairPlay streams?
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How to delete FPS Certificate from Apple developer account
Hello All, I am looking for assistance with our FairPlay Streaming (FPS) certificates. We are in the process of migrating to a new video streaming vendor and need to create a new FPS certificate using SDK 4. However, we have reached the limit of allowed FPS certificates in our account and cannot create a new one. Issue Details: • We currently have two FPS certificates active in our developer account. • One of these was created using SDK 5, but our new vendor (Mux) requires an FPS certificate based on SDK 4. • Since Apple does not allow deleting FPS certificates from the developer portal, we are unable to create a new SDK 4 certificate. • We kindly request Apple to revoke one of our existing FPS certificates to allow us to generate a new SDK 4 certificate. Request: We would greatly appreciate it if you could assist us on how to delete one of our existing FPS certificates so that we can proceed with creating a new SDK 4 certificate for our vendor integration. Thank you for your support.
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Playing FairPlay encrypted content works fine on ios17 but won't play on ios26
For devices that are still on ios17, playing Fairplay encrypted content still works fine. For devices that I've upgraded to ios26 playing the same content in the same app no longer works. I can advance and see the stream frames by tapping +10 scrubbing so I know that the content is being decrypted but tapping the play button of AVPlayer for an AVPlayerItem now does nothing in ios26. Is this a breaking change or is there a stricter requirement that I now have to implement?
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How to consume video from an RTSP service?
Hi,It seems like it's pretty easy to consume HTTP Live Streaming content in an iOS app. Unfortunately, I need to consume media from an RTSP server. It seems to me that this is a very similar thing, and that all of the underpinnings for doing it ought to be present in iOS, but I'm having a devil of a time figuring out how to make it work without doing a lot of programming.For starters, I know that there are web-based services that can consume an RTSP stream and rebroadcast it as an HTTP Live Stream that can be easily consumed by the media players in iOS. This won't work for me because my application needs to function in an environment where there is no internet access (it's on a private Wifi network where the only other thing on the network is the device that is serving the RTSP stream).Having read everything I can get my hands on and exploring third-party and open-source solutions, I've compiled the following list of ideas:1. Using an iOS build of the open-source ffmpeg library, which supports RTSP, I've come up with a test app that can receive the RTSP packets, decode them, create UIImages out of the frames, and display those frames on-screen. This provides a crude player, but performance is poor, most likely because ffmpeg can't take advantage of any hardware acceleration. It also doesn't provide me with any way to integrate the video stream into AVFoundation, so I'm on my own as far as saving the stream to a file, transcoding it, etc.2. I know that the AVURLAsset class doesn't directly support the RTSP scheme. Since I have access to the undecoded RTSP packets via ffmpeg, I've thought it should be possible to implement RTSP support myself via a custom NSURLProtocol, essentially fooling AVFoundation into reading those packets as if they originated in a file. I'm not sure if this would work, since the raw packets coming from the RTSP server might lack the headers that would otherwise be present in data being read from a file. I'm not even sure if AVFoundation would recognize my custom protocol.3. If a protocol doesn't work, I've considered that I might be able to implement my own local HTTP Live Streaming server that converts the RTSP packets into an HTTP stream that the media players can read. This sounds like a terribly convoluted solution to the problem, at best, and very difficult at worst.4. Going back to solution (1), if I could speed up the decoding by using some iOS CoreVideo function instead of ffmpeg, this solution might be okay. However, I can't find any documentation for CoreVideo on iOS (Apple only documents it for OS X).5. I'm certainly willing to license a third-party solution if it works well and provides good performance. Unfortunately, everything I've found so far is pretty crummy and mostly just leverages ffmpeg and/or VLC. What is most disappointing to me is that nobody seems to be able or willing to provide a solution that neatly integrates with AVFoundation. I really want to make my RTSP stream available as an AVAsset so I can use it with AVFoundation players and other classes -- I don't want to build an app that relies on custom third-party code for everything.Any ideas, tips, advice would be greatly appreciated.Thanks,Frank
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TV A1625 Using 3× More CPU After tvOS 26 Update
Hi everyone, After updating my Apple TV HD (model A1625) to tvOS 26, I’ve noticed a significant spike in CPU usage—up to 3× higher than before the update. Go from around 40% to 120% Model: Apple TV HD (A1625) tvOS Version: 26 (stable release) and beta version of 26.1, App downgrade stream due to lack of cpu power If anyone else is experiencing this, please share your findings or workarounds. Would love to hear from Apple engineers or other developers if this is a known regression or if there’s a recommended fix. Thanks!
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Low-Latency HLS stream playback issue on iOS 26
We have a Low-Latency HLS stream, and on iOS 26, even though the bandwidth is sufficient, it still selects a low-bandwidth resolution (e.g., RESOLUTION=640x360) for playback instead of using a higher-bandwidth resolution (e.g., RESOLUTION=1920x1080) when using AVPlayerViewController with AVPlayer. This works fine on iOS version 18 and previous versions. What could be the solution to this issue?
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-46250 error when calling `makeSecureTokenForExpirationDateOfPersistableContentKey`
Hi there, We're working on offline playback of DRM tracks. The persistent keys (also known as track licenses) for offline playback are stored locally on the device and are served from cache when a user initiates playback of a downloaded track. Our persistent keys have a limited validity time and need to be refreshed when they expire. To prevent a situation where a persistent key expires while the user is offline, we've decided to eagerly refresh these keys one week before their expiration date. To make that happen we need to be able to obtain the expiration date of the given track license. We've been attempting to use the makeSecureTokenForExpirationDateOfPersistableContentKey API to facilitate this process. The documentation states that this API returns a secret token representing the persistent key, which we can then exchange with our license server for the expiration date: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/avcontentkeysession/makesecuretokenforexpirationdate(ofpersistablecontentkey:completionhandler:)?language=objc However, every time we call makeSecureTokenForExpirationDateOfPersistableContentKey, we receive an error with code -46250. We haven't been able to find any public references or documentation for this specific error code, which is preventing us from troubleshooting the issue. We are conducting our tests on a physical device, as the simulator does not support FairPlay playback. We don't use dual expiry approach. Is our understanding of how to obtain the expiration timestamp correct? Are we using the makeSecureTokenForExpirationDateOfPersistableContentKey API as it was intended? What does the -46250 error code mean, and what steps should we take to fix our FairPlay implementation to make this work? Thanks in advance for your assistance.
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Sep ’25
CoreMediaErrorDomain -15628 playback failure in iOS 26 (React Native / AVPlayer, HLS stream)
Hi, After updating to iOS 26, our app is facing playback failures with AVPlayer. The same code and streams work fine on iOS 18 and earlier. Error - Domain[CoreMediaErrorDomain]:Code[-15628]:Desc[The operation couldn’t be completed.]:Underlying Error Domain[(null)]:Code[0]:Desc[(null)] Environment: iOS version: ios 26 React Native: 0.69 Video library: react-native-video (AVPlayer under the hood) Stream type: HLS (m3u8) with segment (.ts) files Observed behaviour: Playback works initially on iOS 26. On iOS 26, the stream fails at runtime after a few seconds/minutes (not on first load). Network logs show 307 redirects on some segment requests. After this, AVPlayer throws the above error. Playback fails intermittently on slow/unstable networks.
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Sep ’25
Getting CoreMediaErrorDomain -15628 playback failure in iOS 26 (AVPlayer, HLS stream)
Hi, After updating to iOS 26, our app is experiencing playback failures with AVPlayer. The same code and streams work fine on iOS 18 and earlier. Error: Domain [CoreMediaErrorDomain] Code [-15628] Description [The operation couldn’t be completed.] Underlying Error Domain [(null)] Code [0] Description [(null)] Environment: iOS version: iOS 26 Stream type: HLS (m3u8) with segment (.ts) files Observed behaviour: We don’t have concrete steps to reproduce the issue, but so far, we have observed that this error tends to occur under low network conditions.
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Sep ’25
Crash iOS 26.0: [__NSSingleObjectArrayI selectedMediaOptionInMediaSelectionGroup:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance
I'm having a crash on an app that plays videos when the users activates close captions. I was able to replicate the issue on an empty project. The crash happens when the AVPlayerLayer is used to instantiate an AVPictureInPictureController These are the example project where I tested the crash: struct ContentView: View { var body: some View { VStack { VideoPlaylistView() } .frame(maxWidth: .infinity, maxHeight: .infinity) .background(Color.black.ignoresSafeArea()) } } class VideoPlaylistViewModel: ObservableObject { // Test with other videos var player: AVPlayer? = AVPlayer(url: URL(string:"https://d2ufudlfb4rsg4.cloudfront.net/newsnation/WIpkLz23h/adaptive/WIpkLz23h_master.m3u8")!) } struct VideoPlaylistView: View { @StateObject var viewModel = VideoPlaylistViewModel() var body: some View { ScrollView { VideoCellView(player: viewModel.player) .onAppear { viewModel.player?.play() } } .scrollTargetBehavior(.paging) .ignoresSafeArea() } } struct VideoCellView: View { let player: AVPlayer? @State var isCCEnabled: Bool = false var body: some View { ZStack { PlayerView(player: player) .accessibilityIdentifier("Player View") } .containerRelativeFrame([.horizontal, .vertical]) .overlay(alignment: .bottom) { Button { player?.currentItem?.asset.loadMediaSelectionGroup(for: .legible) { group,error in if let group { let option = !isCCEnabled ? group.options.first : nil player?.currentItem?.select(option, in: group) isCCEnabled.toggle() } } } label: { Text("Close Captions") .font(.subheadline) .foregroundStyle(isCCEnabled ? .red : .primary) .buttonStyle(.bordered) .padding(8) .background(Color.blue.opacity(0.75)) } .padding(.bottom, 48) .accessibilityIdentifier("Button Close Captions") } } } import Foundation import UIKit import SwiftUI import AVFoundation import AVKit struct PlayerView: UIViewRepresentable { let player: AVPlayer? func updateUIView(_ uiView: UIView, context: UIViewRepresentableContext<PlayerView>) { } func makeUIView(context: Context) -> UIView { let view = PlayerUIView() view.playerLayer.player = player view.layer.addSublayer(view.playerLayer) view.layer.backgroundColor = UIColor.red.cgColor view.pipController = AVPictureInPictureController(playerLayer: view.playerLayer) view.pipController?.requiresLinearPlayback = true view.pipController?.canStartPictureInPictureAutomaticallyFromInline = true view.pipController?.delegate = view return view } } class PlayerUIView: UIView, AVPictureInPictureControllerDelegate { let playerLayer = AVPlayerLayer() var pipController: AVPictureInPictureController? override init(frame: CGRect) { super.init(frame: frame) } required init?(coder: NSCoder) { fatalError("init(coder:) has not been implemented") } override func layoutSubviews() { super.layoutSubviews() playerLayer.frame = bounds playerLayer.backgroundColor = UIColor.green.cgColor } func pictureInPictureController(_ pictureInPictureController: AVPictureInPictureController, failedToStartPictureInPictureWithError error: any Error) { print("Error starting Picture in Picture: \(error.localizedDescription)") } } class AppDelegate: NSObject, UIApplicationDelegate { func application(_ application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [UIApplication.LaunchOptionsKey : Any]? = nil) -> Bool { let audioSession = AVAudioSession.sharedInstance() do { try audioSession.setCategory(.playback, mode: .moviePlayback) try audioSession.setActive(true) } catch { print("ERR: \(error.localizedDescription)") } return true } } UITest to make the app crash: final class VideoPlaylistSampleUITests: XCTestCase { func testCrashiOS26ToggleCloseCaptions() throws { let app = XCUIApplication() app.launch() let videoPlayer = app.otherElements["Player View"] XCTAssertTrue(videoPlayer.waitForExistence(timeout: 30)) let closeCaptionButton = app.buttons["Button Close Captions"] for _ in 0..<2000 { closeCaptionButton.tap() } } }
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Sep ’25
Questions about H.264 encoding settings with low-latency rate control
Hi everyone, I noticed that Apple recently added a few new beta sample codes related to video encoding: Encoding video for low-latency conferencing Encoding video for live streaming While experimenting with H.264 encoding, I came across some questions regarding certain configurations: When I enable kVTVideoEncoderSpecification_EnableLowLatencyRateControl, is it still possible to use kVTCompressionPropertyKey_VariableBitRate? In my tests, I get an error. It also seems that kVTVideoEncoderSpecification_EnableLowLatencyRateControl cannot be used together with kVTCompressionPropertyKey_ConstantBitRate when encoding H264. Is that expected? When using kVTCompressionPropertyKey_ConstantBitRate with kVTCompressionPropertyKey_MaxKeyFrameInterval set to 2, the encoder outputs only keyframes, and the frame size keeps increasing, which doesn’t seem like the intended behavior. Regarding the following code from the sample: let byteLimit = (Double(bitrate) / 8) * 1.5 as CFNumber let secLimit = Double(1.0) as CFNumber let limitsArray = [ byteLimit, secLimit ] as CFArray // Each 1 second limit byte as bitrate err = VTSessionSetProperty(session, key: kVTCompressionPropertyKey_DataRateLimits, value: limitsArray) This DataRateLimits setting doesn’t seem to have any effect in my tests. Whether I set it or not, the values remain unchanged. Since the documentation on developer.apple.com/documentation doesn’t clearly explain these cases, I’d like to ask if anyone has insights or recommendations about the proper usage of these settings. Thanks in advance!
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Sep ’25
New FairPlay Keys
Hello, My company has an in-store app with FPS SDK 4.x (1024) keys. We've handed those keys over to a trusted third-party and we do not have them. We've been in-store for several years. The person that created the keys in our organization mistakenly stored them encrypted to our third-party's PGP keys, so we cannot decrypt them, and the third party also has no mechanism to provide us with the keys even though it is in their runtime environment. They only have secure mechanisms for us to upload keys onto their servers. We are trying to migrate to a different third-party DRM provider, and would like to obtain new keys. Unfortunately, the developer portal won't let me create new keys, saying that we have exceeded the number of keys allowed, which I assume is one. Additionally, the new DRM provider can only support SDK 4.x keys, and it appears that we can only request SDK 5.x keys on the Apple Developer portal, as the SDK 4.0 option is grayed out. Regardless, it seems that we are not able to request any keys. We've submitted a request to the support e-mail address and received an automated e-mail that the response should take a few days, but may take longer on occasion. It's now been a month. The e-mail says that the reply address is not monitored. Is there any way we can accelerate this? Thank you, Carlos
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Aug ’25
AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate and CoreMediaErrorDomain -12881 When Playing HLS Audio
I am developing an app that plays HLS audio. When using AVPlayerItem with AVURLAsset, can AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate correctly handle HLS segments? My goal is to use AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate to add authentication HTTP headers when accessing HLS .m3u8 and .ts files. I can successfully download the files, but playback fails with errors. Specifically, I am observing the following cases: A. AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate is canceled, and CoreMediaErrorDomain -12881 occurs In NSURLConnectionDataDelegate’s didReceiveResponse method, set contentInformationRequest In didReceiveData, call dataRequest respondWithData resourceLoader didCancelLoadingRequest is called CoreMediaErrorDomain -12881 occurs B. CoreMediaErrorDomain -12881 occurs In NSURLConnectionDataDelegate’s didReceiveResponse method, set contentInformationRequest In connection didReceiveData, buffer all received data until the end In connectionDidFinishLoading, pass the buffered data to respondWithData Call loadingRequest finishLoading CoreMediaErrorDomain -12881 occurs In both cases, dataRequest.requestsAllDataToEndOfResource is YES. For this use case, I am not using AVURLAssetHTTPHeaderFieldsKey because I need to apply the most up-to-date authentication data at the moment each file is accessed. I would appreciate any advice or suggestions you might have. Thank you in advance!
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Aug ’25