18.6 · VideoToolbox, tvOS focus and media, and building a playback platform
Below the player is hardware, beside it is the television, and above it is an organisation that measures every start and every stall. Awareness of all three is what a senior media engineer brings.
Mental model. Use the hardware decoders, design for the remote and the focus engine, and measure experience, not just correctness.
Hardware and the big screen
VideoToolbox and tvOS focus.
- What is VideoToolbox, when would you use it directly, and what is different about media on tvOS?
VideoToolbox is the low-level framework for hardware-accelerated video encoding, decoding and pixel transfer: VTCompressionSession (encode frames to H.264…
At scale
Designing and operating a playback platform.
- How would you design and operate a playback platform shared by many apps: quality metrics, startup time, rebuffering, DRM and offline?
A playback platform is a shared library and service layer that gives every app in an organisation the same player behaviour, controls and telemetry. Its…
More in Media & graphics
- 18.1 · AVPlayer, time, and editing with compositions
- 18.2 · The audio session, interruptions, routes and AVAudioEngine
- 18.3 · AVCaptureSession, and zero-copy pixel buffers
- 18.4 · HLS, buffering, Now Playing, remote commands, Picture in Picture and AirPlay
- 18.5 · ImageIO formats, Core Image, Metal, and SceneKit versus RealityKit
- 18.7 · Thumbnails and orientation, GIF timing, bitmap layout, and colour spaces
- 18.8 · Extents, working colour space, and a compute pass from start to finish
- 18.9 · Reading an asset, grabbing frames, reading samples, frame-exact time, and pixel buffers