I have some related question re: video processing on iOS.
1) Is it possible to pause, then resume, an AVVideoComposition processing session? I ask this because I've run into problems merging large 1080p video files together when my app is running in the background (i.e., the 10-minute background processing limit for apps). My experience so far has been that the video processing session fails if the app is in the background when the 10-minute limit is hit and the app gets stalled by iOS. If I were able to pause the video processing session, I could detect the approach of the 10-minute limit, then pause the video processing until the user brings the app back to the forefront, then resume it, etc., etc.
2) In lieu of the above capability, is there a way to "extend" background processing for longer than 10 minutes? My app does not fit under any of the categories of apps that are permitted to run continuously in the background. But my need to do so for my app is legitimate and genuine - the reason being that videos on the iphone are huge - 1080p with the newer iphones - and processing them takes a while. In a way, it's not fair to users to limit an app's ability to process video taken on their behalf on the device the video was captured with. Bottom line: an app should be allowed to either continue it to it's completions, or pause and resume at a later time, as long as it's in the middle of an AVComposition video processing session.
3) If neither of the above options is available, could you please recommend a strategy for dealing with this issue. I want to make my app rock-solid in terms of reliability and letting the user know exactly what is going on.
4) Is it possible to up-convert a lower quality video to a higher (albeit fuzzier) quality? For example: say I want to merge two video clips, one a lower quality and one a higher quality. Currently, if I merge these two together, the resulting video plays at the resolution of the higher-quality video; the portion containing the lower-quality video plays in a smaller video frame in the upper-left corner of the larger video frame, with the rest of the frame blacked out. What I'd prefer is to have the lower-quality video fill the larger frame, even if it gets fuzzy as a result. (NOTE: I do want to maintain the aspect ratio of the lower quality video, however, so black bands across top/bottom or left/right are OK.)
Thanks!
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I am building an app for iOS (iPhone and iPad) where the user is able to watch video clips of therapeutic exercises. However, I want to overlay some dynamically generated information (the amount of reps and sets assigned to them by their physio) either "over" or next to the video playing. The amount of reps and sets will be like a counter counting down the amount of work they have left before the next exercise will start playing.
Here is a mock-up of what I would like to achieve if possible Video with dynamic information overlay
So while the video is playing the "Hold" will count for a specified number of seconds. When the time limit is reached, "Sets" is increased by 1 and Hold starts from 0 again. When the Sets are all completed, "Reps" increase by 1 and Hold and Reps start back at 0. Etc.
Can the video playing and all this information be displayed simultaneously on the iPhone/iPad?
I have looked at a number of video hosting solutions that might have this feature built into it, but couldnt find anything that would suit my needs.
Is this possible at all as I have never seen anything like this done before?
Could a solution be to use a iFrame to display the video and then have all the other information that I want on the screen separate to this? Just a thought...
Yes, this is possible, have a look at this example project:
http://www.musicalgeometry.com/?p=1273
This is for a camera overlay, but it also works for existing videos.
How to build an application like slowshutter?
my exact question is how to control shutter speed of ios camera as they did in this application.
The digital iPhone camera does not have any shutter. Shutter speed is a common term used to express exposure time, which cannot be changed on the iPhone camera. Slowshutter basically takes multiple pictures during the set exposure time and merges those images into one image (light trail function). The first picture is displayed entirely and the following pictures are displayed incrementally on top.
For example, let's say the iPhone took three photo's during the set exposure time:
The first picture is used entirely and the following only incremental:
Which results into the following:
If the shutter is set to 5 seconds you take 25 pictures, every 200 millisecond one.
Merge the pictures like described above and your are done :)
The GPUImage project might simplify implementation:
https://github.com/BradLarson/GPUImage
http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2012/02/12/introducing-gpuimage-framework
I'm currently using this method from Apple to take screenshots of my OpenGL ES iPhone game. The screenshots look great. However taking a screenshot causes a small stutter in the game play (which otherwise runs smoothly at 60 fps). How can I modify the method from Apple to take lower quality screenshots (hence eliminating the stutter caused by taking the screenshot)?
Edit #1: the end goal is to create a video of the game play using AVAssetWriter. Perhaps there's a more efficient way to generate the CVPixelBuffers referenced in this SO post.
What is the purpose of the recording?
If you want to replay a sequence on the device you can look into saving the object positions etc instead and redraw the sequence in 3D. This also makes it possible to replay sequences from other view positions.
If you want to show the game play on i.e. youtube or other you can look into recording the game play with another device/camera or record some game play running in the simulator using some screen capture software as ScreenFlow.
The Apple method uses glReadPixels() which just pulls all the data across from the display buffer, and probably triggers sync barriers, etc, between GPU and CPU. You can't make that part faster or lower resolution.
Are you doing this to create a one-off video? Or are you wanting the user to be able to trigger this behavior in the production code? If the former, you could do all sorts of trickery to speed it up-- render to a smaller size for everything, don't present at all and just capture frames based on a recording of the input data running into the game, or other such tricks, or going even further run that whole simulation at half speed to get all the frames.
I'm less helpful if you need an actual in-game function for this. Perhaps someone else will be.
If all else fails.
Get one of these
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC748ZM/A
And then convert that composite video to digital through some sort of external device.
I've done this when I converted vhs movies to dvd a long time ago.
There are a few SO questions regarding frame by frame animation (such as frame by frame animation and other similar questions), however I feel mine is different so here goes.
This is partially a design question from someone with very little ios experience.
I'm not sure "frame by frame" is the correct description of what I want to do so let me describe that. Basically, I have a "script" of an animated movie and I'd like to play this script.
This script is a json file which describes a set of scenes. In each scene there are a few elements such as a background image, a list of actors with their positions and a background sound clip. Further, for each actor and background there's an image file that represents it. (it's a bit more complex - each actor has a "behavior" such as how it blinks, how he talks etc). So my job is to follow the given script referencing actors and background and with every frame, place the actors in their designated position, draw the correct background and play the sound file.
The movie may be paused, scrubbed forward or backward similar to youtube's movie player functionality.
Most of the questions I've seen which refer to frame-by-frame animation have different requirements than I do (I'll list some more requirements later). They usually suggest to use animationImages property of a UIImageView. This is fine for animating a button or a checkbox but they all assume there's a short and predefined set of images that need to be played.
If I were to go with animationImages I'd have to pre-create all the images up front and my pure guess is that it won't scale (think about 30fps for one minute, you get 60*30=1800 images. Plus the scrub and pause/play abilities seem challenging in this case).
So I'm looking for the right way to do this. My instinct, and I'm learning more as I go, is that there are probably three or four main ways to achieve this.
By using Core Animations and defining "keypoints" and animated transitions b/w those keypoints. For example if an actor needs to be at point A at time t1 and point B at time t2 then all I need to do it animate what's in between. I've done something similar in ActionScript in the past and it was nice but was particularly challenging to implement the scrub action and keep everytyhing in sync so I'm not a big fan of the approach. Imagine that you have to implement a pause in the middle of an animation or scrub to a middle of an animation. It's doable but not pleasant.
Set a timer for, say 30 times a second and on every tick consult the model (the model is the script json file along with the description of the actors and the backgrounds) and draw what needs to be drawn at this time. Use Quartz 2D's API and drawRect. This is probably the simple approach and but I don't have enough experience to tell how well it's going to work on different devices, probably CPU wise, it all depends on the amount of calculations I need to make on each tick and the amount of effort it takes ios to draw everything. I don't have a hunch.
Similar to 2, but use OpenGL to draw. I prefer 2 b/c the API is easier but perhaps resource wise OpenGL is more suitable.
Use a game framework such as cocos2d which I'd never used before but seems to be solving more or less similar problems. They seem to have a nice API so I'd be happy if I could find all my requirements answered by them.
Atop of the requirements I'd just described (play a movie given it's "script" file and a description of the actors, backgrounds and sounds), there's another set of requirements -
The movie needs to be played in full screen mode or partial screen mode (where the rest of the screen is dedicated to other controls)
I'm starting with the iphone by naturally an ipad should follow.
I'd like to be able to create a thumbnail of this movie for local phone use (display it in a gallery in my application). The thumbnail may just be the first frame of the movie.
I want to be able to "export" the result as a movie, something that could be easily uploaded to youtube or facebook.
So the big question here is whether any of the suggested 1-4 implementations I have in mind (or others you might suggest) can somehow export such a movie.
If all four fail on the movie export task then I have an alternative in mind. The alternative is to use a server which runs ffmpeg and which accept a bundle of all the movie images (I'd have to draw them in the phone and upload them to the sever by their sequence) and then the server would compile all the images with their soundtrack to a single movie.
Obviously to keep things simple I'd prefer to do this server-less, i.e. be able to export the movie from the iphone but if that's too much to ask then the last requirement would be to at least be able to export the set of all images (keyframes in the movie) so I can bundle them and upload to a server.
The length of the movie is supposed to be a one or two minutes. I hope the question wasn't too long and that it's clear...
Thanks!
well written question. for your video export needs check out AVFoundation (available as of iOS 4). If I were going to implement this, I'd try #1 or #4. I think #1 might be the quickest to just try out, but that's probably because I don't have any experience with cocos2d. I think you will be able to pause and scrub CoreAnimation: check out the CAMediaTiming protocol it adopts.
Ran, you do have a number of options. You are not going to find a "complete solution" but it will be possible to make use of existing libraries in order to skip a bunch of implementation and performance issues. You can of course try to build this whole thing in OpenGL, but my advice is that you go with another approach. What I suggest is that you render the entire "video" frame by frame on the device based on your json settings. That basically comes down to setting up your scene elements and then determining the positions of each element for times [0, 1, 2] where each number indicates a frame at some framerate (15, 20, or 24 FPS would be more than enough). First off, please have a look at my library for non-trivial iOS animations, in it you will find a class named AVOfflineComposition that does the "comp items and save to a file on disk" step. Obviously, this class does not do everything you need, but it is a good starting point for the basic logic of creating a comp of N elements and writing the results out to a video file. The point of creating a comp is that all of your code that reads settings and places objects at a specific spot in the comp can be run in an offline mode and the result you get at the end is a video file. Compare this to all the details involved with maintaining all theses elements in memory and then going forward more quickly or slowly depending on how quickly everything is running.
The next step will be to create 1 audio file that is the length that the "movie" of all the comped frames and have it include any sounds at specific times. This basically means mixing the audio at runtime and saving the results to an output file so that the results are easy to play with AVAudioPlayer. You can have a look at some very simple PCM mixer code that I wrote for this type of thing. But, you might want to consider a more complete audio engine like theamazingaudioengine.
Once you have an audio file and a movie file, these can be played together and kept in sync quite easily using the AVAnimatorMedia class. Take a look at this AVSync example for source code that shows a tightly synced example of playing a video and showing a movie.
Your last requirement can be implemented with the AVAssetWriterConvertFromMaxvid class, it implements logic that will read a .mvid movie file and write it as a h.264 encoded video using the h.264 encoder hardware on the iPhone or iPad. With this code, you will not need to write a ffmpeg based server module. Also, that would not work anyway because it would take too long to upload all the uncompressed video to your server. You need to compress the video to h.264 before it can be uploaded or emailed from the app.
I have read several post on both matters but I haven't seen anyone comparing so far.
Suppose I just want full screen animation without any transparency etc, just a couple of seconds animation (1''-2'') when an app starts. Does anyone know how "video" compares to "sequence of images" (320x480 # 30) on the iPhone, regarding performance etc?
I think there are a few points to think about here.
Size of animation as pointed out above. You could try a framerate of 15 images per second so that could be 45 images for 3s. That is quite a lot data.
The video would be compressed as mentioned before in H.264 (Baseline Profile Level 3.0) format or MPEG-4 Part 2 video (Simple Profile) format. Which means its going to be reasonably small.
I think you will need to go for video because,
1. 45 full screen PNG images is going to require a lot of ram. I don't think this is going to work that well.
Lastly you will need to ad the Media Player Framework which will have to be loaded into memory and this going to increase your load times.
MY ADVICE: Sounds like the animation is a bit superfluous to the app, I hate apps that take ages to load and this is only going to increase you app startup times. If you can avoid doing this, then dont do it. Make you app fast. If you could do this at some other time after load then that is cool.
The video will be a lot more compressed than a sequence of images, because video compression takes previous frame data into account to reduce bitrate. It will take more power to decode, however the iPhone has hardware for that, and the OS has APIs that use this hardware, so I wouldn't feel bad about making use of them.
do not overlook the possibility of rendering the sequence in real-time.