[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCHv8] libavcodec: v4l2: add support for v4l2 mem2mem codecs

[Jorge Ramirez]

On 09/03/2017 02:27 AM, Mark Thompson wrote:
>> +/* in ffmpeg there is a single thread could be queueing/dequeuing buffers so a
>> + * timeout is * required when retrieving a frame in case the driver has not received
>> + * enough input * to start generating output.
>> + *
>> + * once decoding starts, the timeout should not be hit.
> This seems like it could introduce a significant delay on startup for no good reason.  Can you instead just queue packets until either you run out of input buffers or a nonblocking dequeue succeeds?
>
> (I might need to think more about how the semantics of this work.)
>

if the decoder needs 4 blocks, the delay is 200ms, if it is 10 blocks, 
that is 500ms which doesn't seem too significant? when I test I barely 
notice the difference with respect to using the h264 codec (or any of 
the others in fact)

the best solution would be to be able to block until the capture queue 
has frames ready but for that we would need another thread inputting 
independently on the other queue...does ffmpeg allow for this? separate 
threads for input and output?