[FFmpeg-devel] Adding a new output device

[Philip Prindeville]

Hi,

I’m working on network test and measurement and I’ve been tasked to write a test suite for streaming video performance.

This will run inside headless embedded devices (i.e. routers, probes, etc) so has no hardware to render to.  It’s the streaming itself and the end-to-end network transport that I’m interested in, observing jitter, stalls, etc.

To that end, I wanted to write an output device that I can select as the output driver to which the stream will be parsed and synchronized to the appropriate frame rate, collect statistics for CBR/VBR/ABR, etc. but which doesn’t actually do any rendering.

Whatever I write I’ll upstream, but it seems like it might be generically useful.

I’m a network head and I’ve hacked DVB-S, so I’m vaguely familiar with MPEG-4 AVC stream format.  I want to inspect enough of the stream to be able to ensure synchronization with the frame rate, correctness of the stream, etc. but not the expensive/unnecessary parts.

Any guidance for someone jumping into this for the first time?

Thanks,

-Philip