[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 5/8] lavd: add device capabilities API

[Lukasz Marek]

On 05.04.2014 05:15, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
>> I think we have to distinguish input and output devices.
>> I designed it having mostly output devices in mind and it is not
>> optimal for input devices. Things you point are 100% true for input
>> devices and hardly true for output devices.
>>
>
>> Probably any output device has an option that user want to query.
>> Output devices doesn't have options like codec, format, frame_size
>
> thinking of a output device like a TV set, it would have limits on
> what resolution and framerate it can display.
> codecs would be even more limited and might be just raw or might
> support 1 or 2 compressed formats.
>
>
>
>
>> etc because they take them from provided stream. User want to query
>> them to make sure they provide correct stream. I wanted to avoid
>> adding these options to device's option list because they are only
>> useful during probing, not during normal use of the device. When
>> such options appears on the list, they may confuse the user (for
>> example when they list options using av_opt_next() function)
>>
>> For input devices everything is opposite. Probably all devices have
>> the same options already on its options list, so your remarks are
>> OK.
>>
>> I think it would be good to implement it different for input and
>> output devices (I don't mean separate API, but rather different
>> approach when implementing the device). input devices would use its
>> own options, output devices would use the structure I added and hide
>> its options from user.
>>
>> I just don't know how to implement it yet.
>> Maybe additional flag for av_opt_query_ranges to mark that
>> capabilities are queried, other function I already mentioned in
>> previous email, or resign from hiding dummy options. I dont like
>> these dummy options visible tho.
>
> a AV_OPT_FLAG_ could be added to mark them as for capability
> querrying
> or we could even consider to querry the AVCodecContext from an
> AVStream instead of the capabilities struct but iam not sure where
> this would lead to implementation wise

I slept it over and there is a still a problem with aliasing existing 
options (of input devices) with dummy options for querying.
Input device after allocating context have them initialized with default 
values. By design querying capabilities will return results limited by 
set values. So it would always return just one set of values equal to 
device's defaults.

I still think this there should be separate struct to store them in both 
cases.
It can be moved to AVFormatContext to simplify API, but avformat need to 
know size of the structure. It is avdevice specific so I don't know if 
moving it to avformat is good idea. I can add alloc function in 
libavdevice, but it will create dependency.
I don't know if it all is worth removing 2 simple API calls.