[FFmpeg-user] Performance Tuning for Raspberry Pi

[Bruce Diesel]

Hi All,

Please forgive my somewhat basic question, but my searching has not yielded
much information that I can easily understand as I don't have much
knowledge in this space.

I am building a dash cam type application using a Raspberry Pi Zero, some
sensors, and a Pi Camera.  I am burning data from the sensors onto video
using drawtext from a memory file that a separate python program is
continuously updating atomically.

I am really struggling to get reasonable performance.  I get around 6
frames/second at HD quality.  I am not running X Windows, and not
displaying the video, just capturing it.

Using an ffmpeg command line such as:  ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -vf
drawtext="....." test.mpg

Inside the drawtext I am setting the font, centering the text and giving it
the filename to read.

I have very limited understanding of the pros/cons of different codecs etc
so I am looking for a source of information that can help me through this
without me having to become an expert in the subject.

Once thing I can do is stream to a memory file, but that introduces
complexities like file management, memory limitations etc.

Any pointers to a good source of information on this would be most
appreciated.

Bruce