[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 1/2] lavf: add AVOption support for muxers

[Martin Storsjö]

On Sat, 1 Jan 2011, Anssi Hannula wrote:

> On 01.01.2011 21:01, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 01, 2011 at 06:15:08PM +0200, Martin Storsj? wrote:
> >> On Sat, 1 Jan 2011, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> >>
> >>> applications using private fields are writtenm in the knowledge that they will
> >>> stop working the next commit to ffmpeg
> >>
> >> What about applications registering muxers/demuxers of their own? In that 
> > 
> > They should submit them to us and not do that :)
> > That said iam not against keeping the next parameter at a constant location
> > i just dont care too much about it
> 
> Wouldn't applications registering their own muxers break anyway?
> If added after the "next" field, the new "priv_class" field would be
> outside the application-provided AVOutputFormat when checked by
> av_set_parameters().

No, it can be solved relatively cleanly, check how we did it for 
av_reigster_protocol2.

In short, for av_register_protocol2, we solved this by adding a size 
parameter, where the caller specifies how large the struct passed in is. 
In av_register_protocol2, we check if this is smaller than what we expect. 
If it is, we malloc a new internal copy, where we copy as many bytes as 
the caller specified and zero the rest, which then is registered. (This 
internal copy is leaked memory, but that is less bad than failing brutally 
and mysteriously, adding to our reputation of breaking ABI. And it is 
fixed as soon as the caller is recompiled.) Additionally, the fallback 
av_register_protocol calls av_register_protocol2 with the size of the 
previous version of the struct, and is removed at the next major bump.

// Martin