audio-only pathway optimisation

[DrHurt]

What should the engine do?

Use AVPlayer direct playback for all supported audio-only use cases. No HLS needed. Supports both HTTP & local storage files.

AVPlayer already supports most common audio (mp3 & m4a). This includes music & audiobooks.

Very few, niche, use cases would require ffmpeg.

Motivating media or use case

• energy efficient native hardware pipelines on battery operated devices
• Apple’s higher quality decoders compared to ffmpeg
• Apple-exclusive features like reduce loud sounds, enhance dialogue apply via system-wide settings toggle
• Easier metadata integration with rest of system.

Area

Codec / container support

Host app / integration context

No response

Would you be willing to open a PR?

No

[superuser404notfound]

Good call, this is in now.

I have shipped a native-first hybrid that follows the same approach the video path already uses (native AVPlayer by default, software decode only for the gaps):

• AVPlayer-decodable audio (AAC/M4A, MP3, ALAC, AC-3/E-AC-3, LPCM, and FLAC) now plays through a lean AVPlayer reading the source URL directly. No HLS, no loopback, no display-criteria handshake, so it gets the hardware-accelerated, energy-efficient pipeline and the native system integration you described.
• Codecs AVPlayer cannot decode (Opus, Vorbis, APE, WavPack) fall back to the existing FFmpeg path, so coverage stays complete.

One nice surprise: FLAC did not even need the fallback. AVFoundation has decoded FLAC since iOS/tvOS 11, so it routes to AVPlayer too. Verified end to end against AAC, MP3, and FLAC (native path) and Opus (FFmpeg fallback).

Routing is a simple codec whitelist, so adding more native codecs later is a one-line change. Thanks for the suggestion.