[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] avfilter/vf_showinfo: use av_frame_side_data_name() to print side data names

[Jan Ekström]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2023 at 9:31 PM James Almer <jamrial at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This ensures all defined types are supported, even if only to report
> their presence and print their size if a custom implementation is
> not added.
>
> Signed-off-by: James Almer <jamrial at gmail.com>
> ---
> This patch supersedes:
> [PATCH 1/2] avfilter/vf_showinfo: remove superfluous line break
> [PATCH 2/2] avfilter/vf_showinfo: add support for raw Dolby Vision RPU side data
>
> By achieving the same effect in a future proof, generic way.
>

I quite like this approach, and agree with the idea. It did feel weird
that we have a single location which sets human readable names for
side data types, yet it was not utilized.

I think the only drawback is that I'm pretty sure there would be some
side data types printed out now with a different name, and I do know
that some people parse the output of this filter instead of utilizing
ffprobe. Granted, we generally don't promise that log lines are a
machine readable interface. Thus this is not a blocker, but something
to keep in mind.

I wonder if at some point (at the latest when we'll start wanting to
make a generic string/dict based side data setting interface) we'll
want to have separately a "long name" (more human readable) as well as
a shorter identifier similar to AVCodecs' "name".

Jan