[Libav-user] How to corretly setting container and stream information when using an external encoder and using libavformat to pack the movie container

[Ingmar Rieger]

Hello,

I'm currently working on integrating Cineform file read and write into a 
small toy project for processing image sequences. Worked with exr 
sequences up until now but those are so storage heavy I decided to 
include a intermediate video format and with it being the only freely 
available one I decided to give cineform a go.

Therefore I implemented a small file reader first using libavformat to 
open video containers and unpacking the stream while passing the frames 
to the Cineform-sdk for decompressing to have the reference decoder. 
Works fine so far.

Now I'm trying the other way round and pack the frames with the cineform 
encoder and then create a movie container. I tried several approaches 
from several samples and ours of going through the Doxygen documentation 
and google searches etc.

I'm able to write a file that works correct with my simple reader that 
will just extract package for package from the video stream and gets the 
number of frames right and the result looks fine. But there are still a 
few points I haven't managed to get to work correctly related to 
metadata of the container and the stream:

1. Set correct container and stream metadata. I copied the codec 
parameters I extracted from a read cineform example (exported from 
Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve) to begin with as I found no better solution 
for this use case yet.
  - Bit rate is just the value from one sample and depends very much on 
the input resolution, I think the value is from a 4K sample file. Does 
this really matter? The value reported from "ffmpeg -i testout.mov" is 
completely different anyway, I assume it is calculated when calling 
"av_write_trailer"?
2. Correct frame rate/time base settings. Tried several examples, tried 
replicating what I extracted from them and made of the documentation 
regarding libav I found about this topic but as the link below (ffmpeg 
-i output) shows, the framerate is always wrong. Had combinations of 
parameters where I had clips with 16k fps etc.
3. Setting start time code of the stream/clip like in the example.
4. Set stream metadata like encoder information.

Can somebody give me a hint how to set those data to have valid, well 
formed files?

I have the basic structure of calls I do to libav extracted from my 
framework and packed it in a gist for better readability:
https://gist.github.com/irieger/604125fba000f76095626696f34ae619

Also there is the output of an "ffmpeg -i" call for each the reference 
file and the generated output in the file ffmpeg.

Looking forward to some tips how to tackle this task.

-- 
Kind regards,
Ingmar