[FFmpeg-user] FREE RAM DECREASES

[Moritz Barsnick]

Hi Nidheesh,

On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 09:43:02 +0530, Nidheesh V wrote:
> video data is comming to a fifo. The ffmpeg is made to take the fifo data
> and copy it to my sdcard when ffmpeg is used to copy the data,the free ram
> decreases
[...]
> ffmpeg -f h264 -i /tmp/file.h264 -c:a copy -c:v copy /tmp/sdcard/video.avi

Please always include ffmpeg's complete, uncut console output.

> ram free memory should not decrease as time goes.

What operating system are you using?
How do you measure this decrease in "free RAM"?
How long is this encode (input/output bytes, time)?

> Is this a memory leak?

Only if ffmpeg's memory usage increases. The rest of the system is not
really of interest to ffmpeg's memory usage concerns.

Let me kindly point out that Linux, and some other Unixes, use *as much
RAM as possible* for various thinks, in particular for caching the file
system. (These caches get flushed if other programs require the RAM,
roughly speaking.) You could be seeing an effect of the OS caching /tmp/file.h264
(unlikely, as it's a fifo) or /tmp/sdcard/video.avi.

Cheers,
Moritz