[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Add A53 Closed Captions to MPEG header if they are available.

[Marton Balint]

On Fri, 9 Jun 2017, Devin Heitmueller wrote:

> Hello Marton,
>
> On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 5:45 PM, Marton Balint <cus at passwd.hu> wrote:
>
>> As far as I remember multiple side data of the same type is not something we
>> wanted to support. Why do you need it? Can't a single AV_FRAME_DATA_A53_CC
>> side data packet contain many CC entries?
>
> Could you please expand on where this was discussed?  Is there any
> design documentation for side data infrastructure that's been
> introduced into ffmpeg?  Is there some list of other known design
> constraints/limitations?
>
> While I agree it would be great to simply say that you should never
> have multiple side data items of the same type, I'm not sure how
> realistic that is.  It would be helpful if I could better understand
> the rationale in that thinking.

I guess there are two reasons for prohibiting same type side data:

- existing API implicitly gave the impression that is is not supported

Av_frame_get_side_data gives you no possibility to retrieve multiple side 
data of the same type. API users might assumed that the reason for that is 
because it is not possible/permitted.

- consistency with packet/stream side data types

For stream side data is is already explicitly disallowed, API would be 
inconsistent if multiple side data entries of the same types were possible 
for one kind of side data (frame), but not for the other (stream).

> I'm starting a rather large project which will likely stretch the
> design for side data in order to support a variety of other ancillary
> data protocols (e.g. SCTE-104, SMPTE 2038, etc), and it would be great
> to better understand where the constraints are (so I can either plan
> to address those issues, or if too significant then choose a different
> multimedia framework to work with before making a significant
> investment building out a bunch of features in ffmpeg).

Yeah, you definitely have to think about this, depending on your actual 
goals libavcodec/format might not be the best choice for complex ancillary 
data handling.

It seems multiple side data of the same type is not going to pick up 
support from other developers, so you have to come up with something else 
to move forward.

Regards,
Marton