H264 IOS hardware decoder/encoder?

[Andy Savage]

Hi everyone,

I'm just wondering if there are plans to support hardware decoding/encoding which is now supported on IOS 8 devices?

Presumably previous renderers used software encoding/decoding.

Has anybody implemented this themselves with some sample code? I think this could really give a boost to WebRTC on IOS (better battery life and smoother video).

[Alexandre GOUAILLARD]

hi andy,

AVFoundation is handling the hardware acceleration for you, there is no way (AFAIK) to directly call a specific hardware acceleration API for an app on iOS. webRTC reference code comes with an AVFoundation capturer and renderer, and so does webkit (not enabled by default).

Also, I don't have numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of webRTC *native* apps were using VP8 and not 264.

Browsers on iOS do not support webRTC at all, since apps need to use apple webrtc webkit (app store rule 2.17) which does not support webRTC. That includes chrome on iOS. Temasys, samsung, nokia, apple, and in part ericsson are working on fixing this right now.

chrome source:

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/media/video/capture/mac/

webkit source:

http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/158220

http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebCore/platform/mediastream/mac/AVVideoCaptureSource.h

Alex.

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[Andy Savage]

Hi Alex,

Just to clarify, I was not referring to either chrome or webkit on IOS but the native IOS sources.

The details are still in NDA for IOS developers, so I guess to answer my own question we don't have any concrete examples yet in the wild. 

However, as part of the IOS 8 releases they offer up direct access to the H264 encoder and decoder in the Video Toolbox framework.

From what I understand this is already available on OSX, but not on IOS.

If you are an IOS developer you can access the WWDC14 session specifically on the new hardware decoding/encoding APIs they are releasing.

Warm regards,

Andy 

[Alexandre GOUAILLARD]

that's great news!

I will definitely take a look at the WWDC14 session, thanks.

alex.

[Andy Savage]

FYI The session is titled

Direct Access to Video Encoding and Decoding

I was at WWDC and watched the session but it's a bit technically challenging for me to implement myself. 

WebRTC seems the absolutely perfect application to take advantage of this.

Warm regards,

Andy