[FFmpeg-devel] MPEG-PS demuxer index memory usage

[Paul Kelly]

Hello
I'm using libavformat to demux a continuous stream of MPEG2-PS data and am 
running into the problem that memory usage steadily increases over time. 
The problem is not observed when demuxing an MPEG2-TS stream.

After a bit of digging around I discovered the problem is caused by the 
timestamp indexing in the PS demuxer - specifically, the calls to 
av_add_index_entry() in mpegps_read_pes_header() in libavformat/mpeg.c. 
All I'm doing is transcoding the stream to a different output format and I 
don't need to be able to perform seeking but there doesn't seem to be any 
way to disable the index. (I guess the memory occupied by the index isn't 
a problem if a fixed-size file is being demuxed, but in my case I am 
reading data from a hardware MPEG encoder card and splitting the output 
into separate files and the process is required to run indefinitely - the 
index quickly grows to an unwieldy size.)

As far as I can see the flag AVFMT_GENERIC_INDEX can be turned off to stop 
indexing if generic indexing is used (perhaps that's a non-standard usage 
though) - but is there no way to turn off the indexing in the MPEG-PS 
demuxer?

Might it be a good idea to add another flag to turn off the 
demuxer-specific indexing, and make individual demuxers respect this? A 
general catch-all way of disabling indexing (or specifying that seeking 
isn't required) might be more elegant though.

I can get over the immediate problem by simply commenting out the line 
calling av_add_index_entry() in libavformat/mpeg.c, but would like to help 
get a better solution into libavformat if I can.

Best regards

Paul K