[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 2/2] ffprobe: show seekability details in format section

[Gyan Doshi]

On 2025-04-14 10:22 am, softworkz . wrote:
>>> Hi Gyan,
>>>
>>> the problem that I see here is that it's not machine-readable and
>> would require non-trivial parsing to translate back to the actual
>> information behind it.
>>> I think that either a separate sub-section or at least three separate
>> values would be better.
>>
>> I can add a delimiter like |
>>
>> e.g.
>>
>> yes|time(pts),frame-index|demuxer,packet-scan|fast
>>
>> All of the phrases for an attribute are unique, and for that, they just
>> need to grep, not parse the string.
>> Most CLI users will only care about two things: yes/no and forward-only.
> When processing data using formats like XML or JSON by software, there is no "grep".
> Machine-readable means (not only but including) that no additional parsing needs to be done. The XML schema must indicate the possible values and I don't believe that a pipe-delimited multi-string value can be described with an XML schema.

That would require one field for each bit i.e.

seekable_normal=yes
seekable_protocol=no
seekable_via_demuxer=yes
...

That seems like too much bloat for CLI usage.
Any workflow that needs to *take action* based on the seek features, as 
opposed to data archival, should have access to string parsing tools.

How about two fields:

seekability=no
seek-features=n/a

seekability=yes
seek-features=a,b,c|d,e,f|g,h,i

Regards,
Gyan