[Libav-user] "Circular buffer overrun" error when reading UDP stream

[Alex Cohn]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 9:37 AM, Adi Shavit <adishavit at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Note that overrun_nonfatal will break the video output. If the network
>> is very bad, and you have IDR frames sent often enough, or if you use
>> an intra-refresh stream.
>
> Sorry, I don't understand what this means.
>
>
> Basically, my requirements are as follows:
>
> 1. Decode multiple video streams simultaneously from a single MTP stream.
> 2. I do not display the frames, only process the pixels.
> 3. I'm not very sensitive about dropped frames.
> 4. I prefer to process the frames as early as possible, even before
> they would have been displayed in "playing-time".
>
> If the UDP network stream is bad, then just wait until you get some
> proper packets/frames.
>
> Thanks,
> Adi

My bad. Few words got dropped from the last mail. Nevermind, let us
address your scenario.

If your processing consistently fall behind the input stream(s), then
overrun_nonfatal or increasing the cyclic buffer will not really help.

You can skip h264 post-processing to save decoding time. Other than
that, if you detect that your process takes too long, you should apply
it only when the decoder catches up with the stream. In the worst
case, if an IDR frame arrives, you can discard all frames up to IDR,
and essentially start again.

If you cannot configure the encoder, the latter option depends totally
on the nature of your incoming stream. If you can configure the
source, you should be very careful about forcing IDR frames too often:
first of all, these frames take much more bandwidth, and second, they
take longer to decode.

Sincerely,
Alex Cohn