[FFmpeg-devel] Embedded documentation?

[Nicolas George]

Timo Rothenpieler (12023-05-01):
> Somewhat loosely related to this:
> 
> A frequent issue is that it's entirely non-obvious which global libavcodec
> options a codec might make use of.
> Having a way to self-document that would be amazing, so those options show
> up in the --help output, ideally with their codec-specific default.

Interesting remark. I also thought in the past that knowing if a certain
component uses or ignore a particular common option would be useful, but
I had not pushed the reflexion to that point.

> The obvious idea I had for this was to utilize the FFCodecDefault struct
> which already exists, maybe expanding it a tiny bit to allow the second
> value to be NULL, indicating "This codec uses that option, but does not
> change the default".
> 
> Main issue with this is that FFCodecDefault is a private struct.
> It could just be made public and user-queryable, while making every current
> user of it aware of possible NULL-values, which they can then just ignore.

I can imagine a few other solutions.

Note that the way we store the information in the library does not have
to be the same as the way we give that information to the user. For
example, internally we could store an array of used or unused options
and to the user we can include only the used options in AVDocExcerpt.

The most annoying task for this will be to look at the code component by
component.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George
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