Question

I notice that the Dropbox iOS app allows you to set the Upload Quality for uploaded videos (Settings > Upload Quality > Video Quality > Original | High | Medium | Low). I am curious how apps like this get access to the video at the “original” quality. Our apps are using the UIImagePickerController videoQuality property with the low, medium and high settings (UIImagePickerControllerQualityTypeLow/Medium/High) but when using these, the picker controller shows “compressing video” and the result is not the original video.

Perhaps getting access to the original is not possible using the UIImagePickerController and we have to switch to another method?

I do see related question Do not compress video when I select a video but there are no answers to that one.

Any suggestions on getting access to the original video would be appreciated.

Answer 1

In the delegate’s didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo, extract the original url from the info dictionary using the key UIImagePickerControllerReferenceURL, which can be passed to an AVURLAsset.

- (void)imagePickerController:(UIImagePickerController *)aPicker didFinishPickingMediaWithInfo:(NSDictionary *)info { 
{
    NSString* origAssetUrl = [info objectForKey:UIImagePickerControllerReferenceURL];
}