[Ffmpeg-devel] encoding (very) low motion video

[Martijn]

Hi,

I have developed a plugin for an application which renders a home theater PC UI.
The plugin takes screenshots from the UI and encodes them to mpeg-2. These are
then streamed to a compatible UPNP enabled device which displays the UI on the
television.

This works quite well but I think CPU usage is somewhat high. To reduce the CPU
usage a bit more I'm wondering about skipping frames. Obviously the captured UI
is quite static and my app knows exactly if the UI changed. It is kinda
pointless to encode say 24 frames a second, when it only changes every couple of
seconds. Does ffmpeg and mpeg-2 allow to skip frames or can I somehow reuse a
previously encoded frame? Keep in mind that this streams to embedded devices,
which may be quite strict regarding the format so it needs to be legal.

Thanks for any insights or hints,

Martijn