[FFmpeg-user] ffmpeg threads not deleted after closing streams, resulting in mem-leak

Bjoern Drabeck bjoern.drabeck at gmail.com
Wed May 30 12:24:39 CEST 2012


Hi,

I am having a problem where every time I play a movie in the app I am
writing (using ffmpeg LGPL), after closing a file it seems like it is
leaking a lot of memory.

Recently I have mostly developed on Mac OS X 10.7 and every time I close a
video file and then open another one, it seems to leak quite a lot of
memory. The more threads I use, the more severe the problem is, if I set
codecContext->thread_count to 1 it is the least (but that doesn't give good
enough results for HD movies).

Also if I stop execution with the debugger, it seems every time after
closing a file, there are some "leftover threads" from ffmpeg (which I
assume might hold the memory that is leaking). In my current setup with a
1920x1080 HD file I am left with 5 threads and about 50 MB of leaked memory
every time I play a movie. (I didn't seem to have that issue before when I
used ffmpeg 0.9 and single thread)

So I am wondering if with recent changes there is something that I am not
doing correctly, or if this is really a known bug in ffmpeg?

My flow is (roughly) like this:
- avformat_open_input()
- then I pick the streams that I want to use, find a decoder
avcodec_find_decoder() and open it avcodec_open2
- I read the file with av_read_frame and put the packets into their
respective decoders, and av_free_packet them afterwards
- once I am finished I call avcodec_close for all the opened codec and
finally avformat_close_input

I make sure all the packets, and all the objects I created along the way
(swresampler, swscaler, various AVFrame objects etc) are deleted prior to
calling the close functions.

But is there something I need to do to ensure the threads that are created
inside ffmpeg are terminated and all the memory they allocated is removed?

thanks
Bjoern


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