[Libav-user] Direct rendering or avoiding copying locally a decoded AVFrame before rendering

[Paul B Mahol]

On 10/7/13, Julian Herrera (TVGenius) <julian.herrera at tvgenius.net> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I have developed a video player based on ffmpeg for iOS, which is intended
> to play MPEG-2 (SD) and H264 (HD) streams from a DVB-S source. The rendering
> of the decoded video frames is performed by an OpenGL component also
> responsible for converting YUV frames to RGB.
>
> I used the code in ffplay.c as a reference for the steps necessary to decode
> and display the video frames, but I was wondering whether I can improve the
> process by eliminating the need of copying locally each decoded frame before
> enqueuing them for rendering.
>
> Basically I would like to implement the fix proposed in line 1612 of
> ffplay.c (ffmpeg v. 2.0) to bypass the local copy of the decoded frame. So
> the idea is to allocate a brand new AVFrame every time before calling
> avcodec_decode_video2() and then send the frame to the renderer, instead of
> passing a single reusable AVFrame to the decoder and copying locally the
> result frame (this single copying step consumes around 10% of the processor
> time on an iPad 4 whilst decoding h264-based 1080i streams).
>
> I tried such idea unsuccessfully. The resulted frames were rendered out of
> order, so the video was played as if the images were going back and forth in
> time. If I call av_frame_clone(videoFrame) before sending the frame to the

I guess your code does not use reference counting and thus that call
copies all data.

> renderer, the video is played correctly but the same high processor usage
> occurs, which is what I am trying to prevent.
>
> Could you shed some light on how to solve this issue if it is possible?
>
> Regards,
> Julian Herrera
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