[Libav-user] Decoding with limited CPU power

[Devin Heitmueller]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 2:38 PM Simon Brown <simon.k.brown at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks Devin, found the right place, but finding frames to skip seems to be taking more CPU time.

You probably need to understand where within libavformat/libavcodec
the time is being spent.  Such an exercise in profiling can be
non-trivial of course.

> Is there any way of building ffmpeg libraries to a) minimize any other stuff that isn't being used, and b) raise priorities on threads that are decoding?
> Is it faster to run with static libraries or dynamic?  Anything!

You can certainly recompile without stuff that isn't used as well as
build static libraries, but neither of these things will have any
material impact on performance.  Usually excluding unneeded code just
reduces code size but won't make anything run faster.

Adjusting thread priority is likely to only help if you've got other
stuff on the platform competing for CPU resources.

> We've got a 2Mbps stream with just I and P frames, no B frames.  It's just Standard Definition, and it can just about keep up but not quite.  So I need to be able to shave off 1% here, 2% there, etc.

One thing to watch out for - is the output of the decoder something
that can be fed directly into your HDMI output hardware?  Or are you
using libavfilter to do anything like scaling, planer-to-packed
conversion, or colorspace conversion.  On an embedded target these
sorts of operations can actually be more expensive than the actual
H.264 decoding.  Also bear in mind that sometimes such operations are
inserted into the pipeline dynamically based on the specified
input/output formats.

Devin

-- 
Devin J. Heitmueller - Kernel Labs
http://www.kernellabs.com