VTCompressionSessionEncodeFrame: last seconds are lost?

Question

I am using VTCompressionSessionEncodeFrameWithOutputHandler to compress pixel buffers from camera into raw h264 stream. I am using kVTEncodeFrameOptionKey_ForceKeyFrame to be sure that every output from VTCompressionSessionEncodeFrame is not dependent on other pieces. Also, there is kVTCompressionPropertyKey_AllowFrameReordering = false, kVTCompressionPropertyKey_RealTime = true options during session initialization and VTCompressionSessionCompleteFrames called after each VTCompressionSessionEncodeFrame call.

I also collect samples, produced by VTCompressionSessionEncodeFrame and periodically save them as MP4 file (using Bento4 library).

But final track is always shorter than samples, feeded to VTCompressionSessionEncodeFrame on 1-2 seconds. After several attempts to resolve this, i can be sure, that is it VTCompressionSessionEncodeFrame outputs frames, that depends on later frames to be decoded properly - so this frames are lost, since they can not be used to produce "final chunks" of the track.

So the question - how one can force VTCompressionSessionEncodeFrame to produce totally independent data chunks?

Answer 1

Turn out this was... FPS issue! NAL units do not have special timing itself (aside of pts, which is capture-fps-bound in my case), so it is quite important they are produced at exact rate as FPS in movie is expecting them to be... Nothing was lost, just saved frames were played faster (this was not so easy to spot, in fact)