[Libav-user] How to keep AVFrame data after codec close

[wm4]

On Thu, 5 Dec 2013 10:53:37 -0800
Bruce Wheaton <bruce at spearmorgan.com> wrote:

> On Dec 5, 2013, at 3:41 AM, Paul B Mahol <onemda at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 12/5/13, Eric Beuque <eric.beuque at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> How i can tell libavcodec that i want to become the owner of the data and
> >> be able to free it, to without codec context instance? I was thinking about
> >> using get/release_buffer functions, but i don't know how to compute size of
> >> the data.
> >> 
> >> Is data memcpy the only way to do this?
> >> 
> >> Note, that i also can't upgrade to new version of FFMPEG.
> >> 
> >> Thanks for your help.
> >> 
> > 
> > Use reference counting system.
> > They you need to manually free frame once you will not need it
> > (otherwise you leak memory), so you do not need to do copy.
> 
> 
> In my recent experiments, it seemed that closing the codec actually frees all buffers, regardless of reference count. That makes sense - if the codec is gone, what would detect the decreased reference count? 

Did you set AVCodecContext.refcounted_frames to 1? There are other
weird requirements to use refcounting, such as allocating AVFrames with
av_frame_alloc() instead of avcodec_frame_alloc() (or whatever it was).