[FFmpeg-user] live transcoding alignment

[Claudiu Rad]

On 7/28/2014 12:08 PM, Nicolas George wrote:
> Le decadi 10 thermidor, an CCXXII, Claudiu Rad a écrit :
>> 1. how can i enforce keyframe alignment between output transcoded
>> (reencoded) streams in ffmpeg? i don't need P/B or other frame types
>> to be aligned, but I-frames should be exactly on the same frame
>> numbers on all streams
> You could try using the -force_key_frames options, but it is designed for a
> few keyframes, not all the keyframes of a stream. For a long video, you
> could hit the kernel command line limit or other issues, and for a
> continuous stream there is no time limit. Still, have a look.
>
> Or you could force using a constant interval between keyframes, but that
> degrades the quality.
>
> Forcing a keyframe on the encoder for the stream #2 based on the decision
> made by the encoder for the stream #1 should be rather easy to implement. I
> suggest you open a trac ticket tagged as wish/enhancement. Or maybe you can
> try your hand implementing it.
thanks. my fear is that trac tickets tagged as wish may take a long time 
to be solved even if it would be a trivial task for someone who knows 
what to do. and this is understandable by looking at the current list of 
trac items. it would seem that i have to get my hands on the code and 
try to patch it to support what i need. for this i need help regarding 
two matters:
- are the compilation guides at 
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide up to date and recommended 
or would someone recommend other resources regarding this matter?
- for me to get my hands into the code it would help to read first some 
high-level architectural docs or presentations, or anything that can be 
called "a developer guide" and https://www.ffmpeg.org/developer.html is 
just a ruleset, nothing really helpful to understand what's going on 
inside and where can i start. do you know anything that might be 
helpful? also insights from other developers here who already went on 
this path would be great and maybe some general unix development help 
like what editor/ide/etc are you using, etc, because from the 
development point of view, i am coming from a windows environment and 
don't have that much experience with linux programming (just some)
>
>> 2. how can i enforce keyframe alignment also with input which i
>> would like to simply -c copy ? this means that reencoded outputs
>> should have the exactly same keyframe placements as the input, thus,
>> internal codec heuristics should be disabled on this matter.
> If the stream is not only copied but also decoded (if only to -f null), it
> should be as easy to implement as the other option.
i don't really understand this. how would you just decode the stream in 
this case? isn't it decoded for the transcoding process?
like i've said, i want the original to be copied further to a 
destination, just to change the containers, something like this:
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c:v libx264 -s 640x360 -b:v 1000k*-copy_keyframes* 
-c:a copy output1.mp4 -c copy output2.mp4
basically, take an input, change container/destination for it but ALSO 
transcode it to another resolution, and both output1 and output2 should 
pe keyframe-aligned.

this is what i actually aim to try in the patch tentative, this 
alignment is missing the most for me: just copy keyframe positions from 
input. additionally, scene change detection may be still active for 
output1 encoding, i wouldn't mind, but just to insert new keyframes if 
the encoder thinks that its smart, leave the existing ones alone. 
however, i think this would be easy to disable by the sc_threshold 
option. the key point here is "just copy keyframe positions from input".
>> i am talking about a h264/x264 input/output.
> If I remember correctly, with x264, forcing too many keyframes have a big
> negative impact on the quality, even if the forced keyframes are exactly
> those the encoder would have chosen anyway. You should probably look
> carefully at the quality and bitrate of your resulting files.
>
> Regards,
>
>
> -- 
> Claudiu