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iosvideoavfoundationavplayerframe-rate

iOS AVPlayer: How to slow down a 30fps video to 1fps


I have a 30fps Quicktime .mov of still images I created with AVAssetWriter. (It's only about 10 frames long). I would like the user to be able to slow it down using a UISlider to about 1fps, but when I adjust the AVPlayer .rate property from 1 down to 0, it doesn't get anywhere near 1fps, it just stops playback (because a 0 rate is effectively stopping/pausing it, which makes sense). But how can I slow the player down to about 1fps? I think I'd need to do some math to calculate the actual rate, but that's where I'm stuck. Would it end up being something like 0.000000000000001?

Thanks!


Solution

  • If this was a requirement of mine I would approach this as follows (also suggested by Inafziger in the comments). Use AVAssetReader and roll my own viewer for the images. This would give you precise control using a timer as stated in your comments. Make sure you reuse some preallocated image(s) memory area (you can probably get away with space for a single image). I would probably take a pull approach like CoreAudio. When you need an image pull it from some image buffer manager class which calls AVAssetReaders read function. This way you can have N buffers that will always be available. This may be a little overkill. I do believe AVAssetReader pre decodes some amount of the movie upon initialization. This is why I say you can more than likely just get away with using a single buffer for reading image data into.

    From you comment about memory issues. I do believe there are some functions in the AVAssetReader and associated classes that use the create rule.