[Libav-user] Decoding with limited CPU power

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Am So., 19. Apr. 2020 um 23:56 Uhr schrieb Simon Brown
<simon.k.brown at gmail.com>:

>> libavcodec's skip_frame option works fine for h264 and vc1, I strongly suggest
>> that you don't try to reimplement it after testing with "ffmpeg" that it does
>> exactly what you need.
>>
> I'm confused with your negatives in that sentence.  I can't use "ffmpeg" because
> I need to take the decoded frame from memory and copy it to my hardware to
> output on the HDMI port.  So I don't want to reimplement it, but I want to be able
> to enable it in the calls to the codec within my code.

Your first attempt - iiuc - was not to use the skip_frame option for h264 and
vc1 input but to re-implement it in your code (which is technically difficult or
impossible because only while decoding can you decide what to drop).
I suggest you use the option instead of re-implementing it but before you
use it in your code, you could test with the command line interface (with
"ffmpeg") if it does what you want. You could use an input file with similar
properties than the one you will have in your application to test.

Carl Eugen