AVAssetWriter Woes

Question

I\'m trying to use AVAssetWriter to write CGImages to a file to create a video from images.

I\'ve gotten this to work successfully in three different ways on the sim

Answer 1

Well, first you need to pass some bufferAttributes when creating that adaptor object:

    NSDictionary *bufferAttributes = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys: [NSNumber numberWithInt:kCVPixelFormatType_32BGRA], kCVPixelBufferPixelFormatTypeKey, nil];

AVAssetWriterInputPixelBufferAdaptor *adaptor = [AVAssetWriterInputPixelBufferAdaptor
                                                 assetWriterInputPixelBufferAdaptorWithAssetWriterInput:_videoWriterInput
                                                 sourcePixelBufferAttributes:bufferAttributes];

Then remove that call to CVPixelBufferPoolCreate, there's already a pixel buffer pool created in the adaptor object, so call just this instead:

                CVPixelBufferRef pixelBuffer = NULL;
            CVPixelBufferPoolCreatePixelBuffer(NULL, adaptor.pixelBufferPool, &pixelBuffer);
            CVPixelBufferLockBaseAddress(pixelBuffer, 0);

            // ...fill the pixelbuffer here

            CVPixelBufferUnlockBaseAddress(pixelBuffer, 0);

            CMTime frameTime = CMTimeMake(frameCount,(int32_t) 30);

            BOOL res = [adaptor appendPixelBuffer:pixelBuffer withPresentationTime:frameTime];
            CVPixelBufferRelease(pixelBuffer);
            CFRelease(sampleBuffer);

I think that should do it, I've had a similar error at some point and I solved it by creating the adaptor and pixel buffer as shown here..

Answer 2

I've found the solution to this issue.

If you want to have AVAudioPlayer and AVAssetWriter behave correctly together, you must have and audio session category that is 'mixable'.

You can use a category that is mixable like AVAudioSessionCategoryAmbient.

However, I needed to use AVAudioSessionCategoryPlayAndRecord.

You can set any category to be mixable by implementing this:

OSStatus propertySetError = 0;

UInt32 allowMixing = true;

propertySetError = AudioSessionSetProperty (
                       kAudioSessionProperty_OverrideCategoryMixWithOthers,  // 1
                       sizeof (allowMixing),                                 // 2
                       &allowMixing                                          // 3
                   );