I have come across posts saying that the image doesn’t render on the iOS simulator. In order to generate an image, you get the pixels using this call.

CIImage* ciImage = [CIImage imageWithCVPixelBuffer:pixelBuffer];

This will always fail on the simulator.

The workaround to fix this would be creating a frame of your own, and then reading the pixels yourself into the buffer. Here is the code to do that:

NSDictionary* options   =@{ (NSString*)kCVPixelBufferIOSurfacePropertiesKey : [NSDictionary dictionary] };
CVPixelBufferRef pixelBuffer = NULL;
CVReturn err = CVPixelBufferCreate( NULL, width, height,
(OSType)HSPixelFormatToCoreVideoPixelFormat(inPixelFormat),  (__bridge CFDictionaryRef)options, &pixelBuffer);

Here comes the crucial part, in the simulator you would manually need to read the pixels into the buffer.


glReadPixels(0, 0, mWidth, mHeight, GL_BGRA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, videoFrame->GetBuffer());

This should fix the issue your facing. videoFrame is a struct you can create on your own.