[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 5/8] lavu: add a JSON writer API (WIP)

[Nicolas George]

Anton Khirnov (12023-04-29):
> As far as I can see, there are exactly two places in the codebase that
> produce JSON: af_loudnorm and ffprobe.

I think I remember finding a few other places, but it does not matter
much.

Users have been asking¹ for parse-friendly output from filters for years,
and JSON is often the format they prefer. Therefore, all the filters
that log useful information are candidates where a JSON writing API is
useful.

(See my answer to James for why “put it in frame metadata” is not a real
solution.)

> * IMO the filter should not be doing this at all and instead produce some
>   sort of a struct and let the users process it as they wish

And to let users process it as they wish, it needs to be formatted into
a parse-friendly syntax like JSON.

> ffprobe:
> * is not one of the libraries, but rather their caller
> * we are not in business of providing random non-multimedia-related
>   services to callers, unless they are useful in our libraries;
>   if this code is only useful in ffprobe then it should live in fftools/

This is your opinion, not the project policy.

My opinion is that anything that is useful for fftools and can be made
to have a properly-defined API has its place in libavutil.

Let us see which opinion has more support.

> * it is not at all obvious that switching ffprobe to this code would
>   be an improvement; a patch actually demonstrating this would be most
>   useful

I distinctly remember writing the changes to ffprobe and getting the
same output except for the indentation level, but I do not find the
code.


1: To be aware what would be useful to the project, reading the users
mailing-lists helps.

-- 
  Nicolas George
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