[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] lavfi/volume: add dynamic expression evaluation

[Stefano Sabatini]

On date Tuesday 2013-03-05 18:10:45 +0100, Stefano Sabatini encoded:
> On date Tuesday 2013-03-05 16:08:54 +0100, Nicolas George encoded:
> > Le quartidi 14 ventôse, an CCXXI, Stefano Sabatini a écrit :
> > > That's a solution (or add a filter variant). The other solution would
> > > be to make the filter behaves in a different way if the expression is
> > > constant (CONST OP CONST is detected as constant), which would need
> > > some hack to the eval code (of course this can't detect things like
> > > EXPR-EXPR).
> > 
> > Detecting what variables / functions are used in the expression is not
> > impossible at all, and it would allow to know whether the expression is
> > constant or not even in complex cases.
> > 
> > > Please tell what you prefer (and feel free to pick the patch and
> > > improve it yourself if you're in hurry).
> > 
> > Could you make a quick benchmark, using a small frame size (asetnsamples=16
> > for example): that would greatly help knowing whether it is worth optimizing
> > that or not.
> 
> I'm trying to implement av_expr_is_const() (and trying to clean up
> eval code a bit at the same time).

And here there is a problem. In case I have something like this:
foo(100);

assuming the function is constant (and there is no way to know in case
it is an user function), then the evaluation is obviously constant.

OTOH if we have:
foo(W+X)

we don't know which parameters we assume are going to change (which
really depends on the implementation, if the parameters are reset
after one evaluation and the next one).

So av_expr_is_const() doesn't seem like a viable choice (unless I'm
missing something), because it helps only in a few trivial cases,
when no custom functions and no variables are used in the expression.

In this specific case the best solutions seem to implement a mode
which forces re-evaluation for each frame.
-- 
FFmpeg = Forgiving & Furious Minimal Philosofic Elegant Gem