[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] ffmpeg CLI multithreading

[Anton Khirnov]

Hi,
after ~2 years of work and ~700+ preparatory commits, here is finally
the first "fully functional" version of multithreaded ffmpeg CLI. In
quotes because due to the scale of the changes I'm sure some things got
broken and I didn't notice - more testing very much welcome.

One thing which is most definitely broken is the
-fix_sub_duration_heartbeat option, which in its current form makes
assumptions about synchronization between distant components
(encoders/muxers -> decoders), which makes it fundamentally
non-deterministic when each of these components runs asynchronously
(note that its behaviour is unpredictable even now, it's just
deterministic across runs with the same options). I'm currently
disabling the option in 16/24, better suggestions on what to do with it
are welcome.

Runtime overhead of the threading seems to be negligible in typical
cases, though it may become significant when there is very little work
per packet. You should see significantly better CPU
utilization/wallclock speedup on multicore systems whenever transcoding
isn't dominated by a a single component and the components aren't
themselves already multithreaded.

The set is structured similarly to the previous RFC:
* 01-09/24 are preparatory fixes and could be pushed on their own well
  before the rest of the series; thanks to Paul for writing 02/24
* 10-17/24 move the two remaining components (encoding and filtering)
  into threads (as before it's "fake" threading where the main thread
  waits for the other thread to be done, and is thus not truly parallel)
  and do other preparatory changes - these may introduce significant
  temporary overhead and/or break some corner cases, so should be pushed
  when the whole set is ready;
* 18/24, the biggest individual patch, adds the transcode scheduler; as
  of that patch it does not yet do anything;
* 19-24/24 convert the individual components to use the scheduler; the
  conversion is split for review purposes, but will have to be squashed
  for the final push.

Some more information is in my recent VDD talk [1]. You can also fetch
the code from the 'ffmpeg_threading' branch in [2].

Reviews, testing, and constructive comments are all very much welcome.

[1] https://youtu.be/Z4DS3jiZhfo?t=1221
[2] git://git.khirnov.net/libav

Cheers,
-- 
Anton Khirnov