Convert UIImage to CMSampleBufferRef

Question

I am doing video recording using AVFoundation. I have to crop the video to 320x280. I am getting the CMSampleBufferRef an

Answer 1

This is a function that I use in my GPUImage framework to resize an incoming CMSampleBufferRef and place the scaled results within a CVPixelBufferRef that you provide:

void GPUImageCreateResizedSampleBuffer(CVPixelBufferRef cameraFrame, CGSize finalSize, CMSampleBufferRef *sampleBuffer)
{
    // CVPixelBufferCreateWithPlanarBytes for YUV input

    CGSize originalSize = CGSizeMake(CVPixelBufferGetWidth(cameraFrame), CVPixelBufferGetHeight(cameraFrame));

    CVPixelBufferLockBaseAddress(cameraFrame, 0);
    GLubyte *sourceImageBytes =  CVPixelBufferGetBaseAddress(cameraFrame);
    CGDataProviderRef dataProvider = CGDataProviderCreateWithData(NULL, sourceImageBytes, CVPixelBufferGetBytesPerRow(cameraFrame) * originalSize.height, NULL);
    CGColorSpaceRef genericRGBColorspace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB();
    CGImageRef cgImageFromBytes = CGImageCreate((int)originalSize.width, (int)originalSize.height, 8, 32, CVPixelBufferGetBytesPerRow(cameraFrame), genericRGBColorspace, kCGBitmapByteOrder32Little | kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedFirst, dataProvider, NULL, NO, kCGRenderingIntentDefault);

    GLubyte *imageData = (GLubyte *) calloc(1, (int)finalSize.width * (int)finalSize.height * 4);

    CGContextRef imageContext = CGBitmapContextCreate(imageData, (int)finalSize.width, (int)finalSize.height, 8, (int)finalSize.width * 4, genericRGBColorspace,  kCGBitmapByteOrder32Little | kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedFirst);
    CGContextDrawImage(imageContext, CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, finalSize.width, finalSize.height), cgImageFromBytes);
    CGImageRelease(cgImageFromBytes);
    CGContextRelease(imageContext);
    CGColorSpaceRelease(genericRGBColorspace);
    CGDataProviderRelease(dataProvider);

    CVPixelBufferRef pixel_buffer = NULL;
    CVPixelBufferCreateWithBytes(kCFAllocatorDefault, finalSize.width, finalSize.height, kCVPixelFormatType_32BGRA, imageData, finalSize.width * 4, stillImageDataReleaseCallback, NULL, NULL, &pixel_buffer);
    CMVideoFormatDescriptionRef videoInfo = NULL;
    CMVideoFormatDescriptionCreateForImageBuffer(NULL, pixel_buffer, &videoInfo);

    CMTime frameTime = CMTimeMake(1, 30);
    CMSampleTimingInfo timing = {frameTime, frameTime, kCMTimeInvalid};

    CMSampleBufferCreateForImageBuffer(kCFAllocatorDefault, pixel_buffer, YES, NULL, NULL, videoInfo, &timing, sampleBuffer);
    CFRelease(videoInfo);
    CVPixelBufferRelease(pixel_buffer);
}

It doesn't take you all the way to creating a CMSampleBufferRef, but as weichsel points out, you only need the CVPixelBufferRef for encoding the video.

However, if what you really want to do here is crop video and record it, going to and from a UIImage is going to be a very slow way to do this. Instead, may I recommend looking into using something like GPUImage to capture video with a GPUImageVideoCamera input (or GPUImageMovie if cropping a previously recorded movie), feeding that into a GPUImageCropFilter, and taking the result to a GPUImageMovieWriter. That way, the video never touches Core Graphics and hardware acceleration is used as much as possible. It will be a lot faster than what you describe above.