[Libav-user] Using Video Toolbox hardware decoding

[Jean-Yves Avenard]

On 3 November 2015 at 21:04, Info || Non-Lethal Applications
<info at non-lethal-applications.com> wrote:

>
> I just grabbed the latest 1.8.1 source code and I don’t see any flag to
> toggle async decoding.
> I only see that the function videotoolbox_session_decode_frame waits for the
> asynchronously decoded frames using
> VTDecompressionSessionWaitForAsynchronousFrames.
> Is the waiting part what you mean?

I have no experience in using VT via ffmpeg, I've only ever accessed
VT directly (wrote the Firefox h264 decoder on mac)

The async flag (kVTDecodeFrame_EnableAsynchronousDecompression) is
provided to VTDecompressionSessionDecodeFrame

In my personaly experience, not turning that flag, and instead waiting
for the frame with VTDecompressionSessionWaitForAsynchronousFrames
immediately leads to severe performance issue.
To the point where you typically get better performance using the
ffmpeg sofware decoder

This is even more true on mac not supporting HW decode (in particular
late-2013 mac pro)

>
> Do you have any insight why this is not used for Pro Res decoding?

most likely because the FFmpeg avcodec_decode_video2 is synchronous.
There's no straight forward mechanism to have callbacks returning
frames at a later point.
Not that it can't be done.