What is VideoToolbox?
VideoToolbox is a multimedia framework developed by Apple for macOS and iOS. It provides interfaces for processing, compressing, and decompressing digital video. VideoToolbox takes advantage of hardware acceleration available on Apple devices which allows it to efficiently encode and decode video content.
Some key capabilities of VideoToolbox include:
- Hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding of popular video codecs like H.264, HEVC, MPEG-4, and ProRes
- Multi-threading support for fast parallel processing
- Ability to convert video between formats, resize video, extract thumbnails, etc.
- Seamless integration with other macOS media frameworks like AVFoundation, Core Image, and Core Media
VideoToolbox is useful for developers working on media applications such as video editors, transcoders, movie players, streaming apps etc. where high performance video processing is critical. The hardware optimization frees up the CPU for other tasks. With support for the latest video standards and encoders, VideoToolbox ensures efficient use of resources.