• Philip Langdale's avatar
    avcodec: Add explicit capability flag for encoder flushing · 22b25b3e
    Philip Langdale authored
    Previously, there was no way to flush an encoder such that after
    draining, the encoder could be used again. We generally suggested
    that clients teardown and replace the encoder instance in these
    situations. However, for at least some hardware encoders, the cost of
    this tear down/replace cycle is very high, which can get in the way of
    some use-cases - for example: segmented encoding with nvenc.
    
    To help address that use case, we added support for calling
    avcodec_flush_buffers() to nvenc and things worked in practice,
    although it was not clearly documented as to whether this should work
    or not. There was only one previous example of an encoder implementing
    the flush callback (audiotoolboxenc) and it's unclear if that was
    intentional or not. However, it was clear that calling
    avocdec_flush_buffers() on any other encoder would leave the encoder in
    an undefined state, and that's not great.
    
    As part of cleaning this up, this change introduces a formal capability
    flag for encoders that support flushing and ensures a flush call is a
    no-op for any other encoder. This allows client code to check if it is
    meaningful to call flush on an encoder before actually doing it.
    
    I have not attempted to separate the steps taken inside
    avcodec_flush_buffers() because it's not doing anything that's wrong
    for an encoder. But I did add a sanity check to reject attempts to
    flush a frame threaded encoder because I couldn't wrap my head around
    whether that code path was actually safe or not. As this combination
    doesn't exist today, we'll deal with it if it ever comes up.
    22b25b3e
avcodec.h 175 KB