Even the main focus is Android these days, we’re not forgetting iOS either. In iOS 9, a new video recording API was introduced, called ReplayKit. We are preparing support for this API. The main advantage, besides the ease of use when implementing the native code (which is not a concern for AIR devs anyway), is full audio recording support (at least if the videos we saw don’t lie). It should be possible to include microphone as well, but otherwise what the game is playing out of speakers appears to be recorded in the video.
ReplayKit is completely separate from the FW video capture path which uses AVFoundation & OpenGL ES, so there are some disadvantages as well. You won’t be able to configure the video quality or resolution (this is also an upcoming feature of the next FW version, see below).
The biggest downside however appers to be the inability to access the video mp4 file (or the ByteArray with the video as a result). Instead, Apple offers a default dialog to share the video to social networks. Thats why ReplayKit cannot fully replace FW for now. We’ll be offering it only as part of FW iOS ANE, for those who prefer to capture audio without FWSoundMixer and don’t mind the missing video file access (& are happy with the social sharing support).
Another big downside currently has to do with AIR. AIR doesn’t support ReplayKit framework in its latest version still. Even it is possible to workaround this on Mac, you can’t workaround that on Windows. Likely Adobe will need to rebuild their version of ld64 Apple linker, as the frameworks including ReplayKit now work with different stub formats than they used to.
We’ll see how long this takes, hopefully not too long. In the meantime it will be possible to build ReplayKit supported projects only on Mac.
Custom resolutions
As mentioned, FW iOS will start supporting custom resolutions when recording in realtime mode. Until now, you were stuck with harcoded resolution depending on what AIR requested from iOS. This was also a default when recording from highres apps. But not anymore – if your app is highres and you wish to record for example to 1920 x 1080 – or, on the other hand, you wish to make the final video really lowres (400 x 300) to send it faster over the network, you are free to do so. Just specify the dimensions as usual with setDimensions(w, h) or within start and FW will scale the video as needed.
If you don’t specify any dimensions FW will behave as usual to not break backward compatibility.