[Libav-user] Is it possible to detect unused/invalid packets (without decoding)

[Info || Non-Lethal Applications]

> On 28 Jan 2015, at 15:15, wm4 <nfxjfg at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 28 Jan 2015 15:51:53 +0200
> Anton Shekhovtsov <shekh.anton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 2015-01-28 15:34 GMT+02:00 Nicolas George <george at nsup.org>:
>> 
>>> Le nonidi 9 pluviôse, an CCXXIII, Max Vlasov a écrit :
>>>> The idea was to read all packets saving pts and keyframe flag (without
>>>> decoding) and make a list of them in order of ptses. After this we have a
>>>> ready FrameCount and when one needs to jump to an exact frame number
>>> 
>>> Why do people here always want to work with frame numbers? Frame numbers
>>> are
>>> unreliable, they are a remnant of the time where containers could only do
>>> constant FPS.
>>> 
>>> The correct way of identifying a frame is not its number, it is its
>>> timestamp.
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> 
>>> --
>>>  Nicolas George
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Libav-user mailing list
>>> Libav-user at ffmpeg.org
>>> http://ffmpeg.org/mailman/listinfo/libav-user
>>> 
>>> 
>> Frames are important entities if the application is video editor.
>> It wants to treat video as a sequence of images. It wants discrete timeline
>> where each frame is a unit.
>> How about buffering 40ms of video in memory? Vague. 40 frames? Required
>> memory=frame_size*40. Simple. etc
> 
> Things like FFMS2 use a complete index and a cache for this.
> L-SMASH-Works (which is a different project from L-SMASH)
> does something similar and is more modern, AFAIK.

The last time I tried FFMS it took 20 seconds or more to index a larger file.
I don’t think that any user would be OK with that.
So indexing the whole file does not sound like a good idea to me.

This may however depend on the video files you’re trying to use.
My application also has to deal with files a couple of gigs in size.