[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] fftools/ffmpeg and libavdevice/sdl issue

[Stefano Sabatini]

On date Wednesday 2023-12-13 10:08:45 +0100, Anton Khirnov wrote:
> Quoting Zhao Zhili (2023-12-12 18:27:39)
[...]
> Honestly I don't see how this could be done in ffmpeg CLI without
> disgusting hacks, but before that the question is:

> why is there an SDL
> "muxer" and why would anyone want to use it in ffmpeg CLI? What actual
> use cases does it serve that cannot be better handled otherwise?

As the author of the first sdl.c muxer, maybe I can answer to this
question. It was done partly as an exercise and for fun, but also
because this was useful extremely handy for testing (e.g. to display
the output of a filterchain from ffmpeg, or to display a streamed
video in realtime).

The final goal was (still is) to unify all the tools as very thin
instances of the library. Even if this might be not practical, I think
it is a good final design plan (e.g. ffprobe might be turned to a
custom muxer, ffplay would be the realtime output of a filtergraph
connected to a rendering device, ffmpeg would be a data filtergraph
processor, and you can mix rendering and encoding if you add a movie
sink to the game).