[FFmpeg-user] Building a video on the fly?

[John Dexter]

First post, please be gentle!

I'm debating whether I need to use the libraries programatically or can
manage with the command-line tool. My app does 3D rendering and the idea is
to build a video from the rendered frames.

Now I know I can save all frames to individual image files and then build a
video, but I'm not sure it will be practical in our case. So I wondered if
ffmpeg command-line tools provide any way to build a video "on the fly" -
e.g each rendered frame gets saved to a file and ffmpeg is told to add this
to an existing video, then the image file is deleted. Since I'm pretty sure
video encoding requires looking forwards (and maybe backwards?) several
frames it seems a bit of a long shot, but it seems worth checking first.

Thanks,
John.