Using FFmpeg in Windows Applications

[Vicpa 562]

Hi @@7illusions,@@Luke

 

Did you guys see this? http://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2015/06/05/using-ffmpeg-in-windows-applications/

 

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  But it looks pretty cool for the maybe for server in general and the win app for any formats that media foundation can't handle natively.

 

Luke maybe some of the ffmpeg gurus can check it out for the future.

 

Apologies if it is old news. 

[techywarrior 688]

Interesting. I suspect that it won't have any benefit to Emby though. For the server there is no need for the interop library because the server isn't playing the media itself. And for the server transcodes, Emby probably needs more control over the build of FFMpeg.

 

The places where this could be used would be in Emby Theater and Emby for Win8.1/10 but it would have to be an option since many people, especially on 7's app, would be running on much lower hardware then their server. But there could be a setting like "use direct media and transcode locally". May not be worth the hassle if it requires a recode of the video player since I don't think many people would use it (unless there turns out to be some PQ improvements or something)

[Vicpa 562]

Hi,

With Win 10 most things direct play anyway. For the app I was only thinking of things it can't. in effect a decoder of last resort. Until MS gets off the dime and puts stuff back in like wtv and mpeg2video. and/or some of the some of the playlist formats.

[techywarrior 688]

Yea, but like I said. With most people having more powerful servers it makes more sense for the transcode to happen there.

 

Now that I think about it more. Emby Theater has LAV integrated so it can direct play most stuff too. I would imagine there wouldn't be a benefit to transcode in FFMpeg instead of using LAV so that would eliminate Emby Theater from using this new library too. Unless LAV doesn't get the benefit hardware acceleration (but it does I believe).

 

Maybe Alphid or 7 know of a use that I don't. Otherwise it's just something cool you pointed out

[Luke 37125]

This will be useful in client apps, but the server already has it so it's not necessary there.

[techywarrior 688]

Well, that's good then.

 

I would assume you would need to play with it but other then moving the transcode process to the client from the server are there other benefits?

 

Does replacing LAV with FFMpeg and the interop library give us any benefit in Emby Theater?

 

I guess something else I didn't really think of is all the container swapping and transcode to change audio channels that is currently needed. Low power clients can probably handle those simple transcodes with little problem (but power usage should be considered if this because the default method in the future)