How do you access hardware decoding on tvOS without VideoToolbox?

Question

Since VideoToolbox isn't available for tvOS, how do I decode video?

I have an app where I have frames of h.264 in memory (streams in over the network) and I was handling the decoding with VideoToolbox previously. What's the replacement?

Jiggered

Well, I wanted to post this as a comment rather than an Answer since this is a bit of a old question, but I lack the Rep to do so 😩 Anyway, I was looking for example code for VideoToolbox and this question shows up early on in a few different google searches so I figured I'd chuck in an update for others who find it: tvOS 10.2 and later get VideoToolbox support for hardware encode and decode of video! And if this is news to the OP, hopefully it will be helpful and you can get it working in your app from when this question was originally asked 😊 – Materi

Answer 1

You can use OpenH264

OpenH264 is a codec library which supports H.264 encoding and decoding. It is suitable for use in real time applications such as WebRTC. See http://www.openh264.org/ for more details.

Gybe

That would get me software decoding, not hardware decoding. – Jiggered

@alexey-kubs do you have an implementation example? – Kirghiz

Update: This is what I ended up having to do, but, A) it's software decoding, not hardware and B) it doesn't even support the High profile, which is what everyone wants to use. It only supports baseline. It's not a featureful h264 library. – Jiggered