• libcamera-vid pipe vs network socket

    From meff@3:770/3 to All on Tuesday, June 07, 2022 06:23:31
    Not sure if anyone has played around with this. I have a Raspberry Pi
    camera hooked up to a RasPi running Raspbian. I'm capturing video from
    the camera by running the included "libcamera-vid" which lets you
    specify output formats. I'm having libcamera-vid output through a pipe
    and having ffmpeg read from the pipe before doing some things with the
    output in real time.

    In some tests I've run on a different machine, I found that ingesting
    realtime camera data from ffmpeg (where I don't need to invoke
    libcamera) then piping it to ffplay is lossier than streaming bytes
    over loopback RTP/UDP and having ffplay ingest the UDP. I'm not sure
    if this is because of some issue with the pipe or if the encode/decode
    I was running on this machine was causing CPU contention resulting in
    dropped frames.

    In that spirit, I was wondering if there was performance I was losing
    by using a pipe to take libcamera-vid's output and push it into
    ffmpeg. The unrelated tests I ran on the other machine was streaming
    at 1080p while the Pi is dealing with 640x480 video so the h264
    encoder has to work a lot less hard, and the stream is not being
    viewed on the Pi so nothing has to be written to a graphics buffer, so
    I don't even know if there would be an issue on the Pi, but I'm
    curious if I'm losing out on performance here.

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