[Libav-user] Multithreaded decoding of multi-program transport streams

[Michael Chisholm]

On 12/3/2013 2:36 AM, Antoine Martin wrote:
>
>> I use multiple encoders, in my case, simultaneously in different
>> threads, and it works fine.  I think decoders should work fine too.
>> One thing I do is register a custom locking function via
>> av_lockmgr_register() just in case some bit of internal library code
>> wants to serialize threads through a critical section.
> Can someone please clarify for me when using "av_lockmgr_register" is
> required as I am not 100% sure I understand: on what types of builds
> (win32threads? pthreads? all?) and under what circumstances? (encoders,
> decoders, both? type of streams?)
> Maybe it's always required and we've just not really hit the problem yet
> because we don't use multi-clients often.. (each client gets its own
> encoding thread). And multiple contexts from the same thread works just
> fine.
>

I can't give an official answer, but awhile back during development of 
my tool, I started seeing warning messages from ffmpeg about 
insufficient locking.  I looked into the source and I remember there was 
a simple check: a counter incremented on entry to a function, and 
decremented on exit.  If the counter ever went greater than 1, the 
warning was generated.  It's a simple concurrency check, independent of 
thread library.  That led me to the av_lockmgr_register() function, 
which I used to make the warning go away.

I peeked into the ffmpeg source again, and I see it being used in 
avcodec_open2(), as an example.  The doxygen docs say that function is 
not thread safe, but it appears to have some locking code which could 
make it thread-safe as long as you've registered a locking function. 
See libavcodec/utils.c.

Andy