[FFmpeg-user] Container format that allows quick frame count of unfinished video.

[Kal Sze]

Hello.

I have a particular requirement in the application that I am developing.

We have a Debian server and a bunch of Windows machines. Each Windows
machine is responsible for capturing and encoding multiple videos as
H.264 or FFV1, and writing them out to the Debian server over samba.

On the Debian server, we need to periodically kick off some task to
process arbitrary chunks of those videos - i.e. not constant length
and not at regular time offsets - while the videos are still being
captured, encoded, and written to disk. My question is: is there a
particular container format that would allow ffmpeg on the Debian
server to quickly determine the current number of frames available for
reading. I have already tried AVI and MKV, in both cases ffmpeg seems
unable to determine the current decodable length ("Duration: N/A").

Kal