[Ffmpeg-devel] ratecontrol advice

[Matthew Hodgson]

Rich Felker wrote:
> On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 12:55:44AM -0700, Loren Merritt wrote:
> 
>>(Warning: anything done by a 1pass encode will be an approximate/soft 
>>limit, since you don't know in advance excatly how many bits a given QP 
>>will take. So you'll need to fudge the limit a little if you care about 
>>strict compliance.)
> 
> 
> While true, this isn't an inherent limitation, just a flaw in lavc's
> rate control engine. It's easy to implement strict limits in 1pass
> encoding: just repeatedly reencode the frame at different values of qp
> until you find one that gives the size you want. With binary search it
> shouldn't even be that slow...

This was the hack I was going to resort to if I couldn't get lavc's RC 
engine to try to cap the framesize internally.  As it stands, though, I'm 
going to try Loren's suggestion by doing something along the lines of

bits= qp2bits(rce, q);
...
if (bits > max_frame_size)
	q = bits2qp(rce, max_frame_size);
else
	// use existing if(max_rate) code

in modify_qscale() - assuming that the bits value returned by qp2bits is a 
guess of the current frame's size at the given picture QP.  It's not a 
complete disaster if the framesize sometimes drifts slightly over the maximum.

huge thanks for the advice :)

M.