[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] extend vhook to accept command line arguments from a file

[Víctor Paesa]

Hi,

> Please find attached a patch that extends the current vhook
> functionality to make ffmpeg accept vhook arguments from a file
> instead of the command line.
>
> This is my first email to the list and I want to know if this patch can
> be committed to the ffmpeg source.

I'm afraid vhook is deprecated by now. The substitute will be the result
of a Google Summer of Code project (and we're in mid Summer already).

> Description of the patch:
>  - Applies on revision 9558 of ffmpeg.
>  - creates a new command line option "-vhookf" that accepts a file
> name as its argument.
>    The file name contains the list of arguments that would be
> otherwise be passed to vhook in the command line.
>  - Please have a look at the attached README to see how exactly the
> new option ( "-vhookf" ) would be used.
>
> Advantage with this patch:
>
> vhook works fine if you have a few number of images to be overlayed on
> the video which you can specify directly on the command line. But when
> you have a very large number of images to be overlayed on multiple
> locations on the video and at different points in time, you may want to
> have all the arguments supplied to ffmpeg through a file instead of
> having an enormously long command line option.

Notice that it would be much faster if you modify the vhook itself
(i.e. imlib2.c in your example) to accept multiple occurrences of
its arguments (right in the command line or via a file).

> I am using the patched version of ffmpeg currently for the project that
> I am working on in my lab.
>
> Any suggestions on this are more than welcome.
> Please let me know if there are any more improvements that can be made
> so that I can work on them and resubmit.

I'd suggest to wait a bit, and re-submit when the new libavfilter framework
is finished.