Fix for iOS playback of high-resolution recorded footage not working (in some cases)

[alax]

I've had an issue with my iOS 18 devices refusing to playback recorded footage from some cameras (on Frigate 0.16.0-f141b58). The issue manifests as live view and clips working, but viewing/scrubbing the timeline of recorded video never loads. It works for cameras that have a normal recording resolution (1080p) but not for my panoramic cameras that have a resolution of 8192x1728. (AXIS Q3819-PVE)

Long story short, the issue is that iOS 18 won't play H264 HLS streams above a certain resolution/bit rate. Even though it works on Safari for Mac (and other other browsers), iOS devices just refuse, with an error 499 showing up in the Nginx logs on Frigate (and the device itself showing an error requesting the playlist and stream segments via the Safari inspector).

The fix for me was easy: iOS supports larger bit rates/resolutions when the format is H265. I switched my camera to encode the record stream in H265 (leaving detect in H264) and now playback of recordings works perfectly. It also seems that Firefox picked up H265 support somewhat recently, because I can still watch the recordings in Firefox (for Mac) as well.

Just wanted to let others know in case they also run into this problem.

[robbins]

It looks like I'm also facing this issue, seeing HTTP 499 in Nginx and an infinitely-loading video when playing alert recordings on an iPhone.

My RTSP streams are as follows:
Codec: MPEG-H Part2/HEVC (H.265) (hevc)
Video resolution: 640x360

and settings:

ffmpeg:
  hwaccel_args: preset-intel-qsv-h265

Have tried both with and without apple_compatibility. It did work initially, and it seemed like the issue started around when I added substreams for decode, but removing them didn't fix it.