[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] avfilter: implement halve filter

[Mark Thompson]

On 14/02/17 19:44, Daniel Oberhoff wrote:
> filter strictly “halves” the image efficiently, which is often exactly what is needed
> likely much faster than using scale

Did you benchmark this?  How?

$ time ./ffmpeg -f lavfi -i allyuv -vf 'scale=iw/2:ih/2' -vframes 400 -f null -
...
frame=  400 fps= 26 q=-0.0 Lsize=N/A time=00:00:16.00 bitrate=N/A speed=1.05x
...
real    0m15.365s
user    0m11.092s
sys     0m4.272s

$ time ./ffmpeg -f lavfi -i allyuv -vf 'halve' -vframes 400 -f null -
...
frame=  400 fps= 22 q=-0.0 Lsize=N/A time=00:00:16.00 bitrate=N/A speed=0.873x
...
real    0m18.392s
user    0m46.280s
sys     0m3.656s

So it uses four times as much CPU as swscale to be marginally slower?

(Skylake 6300; I admit the SMT could well be making it look a bit worse than it actually is on the CPU time.)

On a more general note, components that duplicate existing functionality are unlikely to be accepted without a compelling use-case for them to be included.