Currently, AVStream contains an embedded AVCodecContext instance, which
is used by demuxers to export stream parameters to the caller and by
muxers to receive stream parameters from the caller. It is also used
internally as the codec context that is passed to parsers.
In addition, it is also widely used by the callers as the decoding (when
demuxer) or encoding (when muxing) context, though this has been
officially discouraged since Libav 11.
There are multiple important problems with this approach:
- the fields in AVCodecContext are in general one of
* stream parameters
* codec options
* codec state
However, it's not clear which ones are which. It is consequently
unclear which fields are a demuxer allowed to set or a muxer allowed to
read. This leads to erratic behaviour depending on whether decoding or
encoding is being performed or not (and whether it uses the AVStream
embedded codec context).
- various synchronization issues arising from the fact that the same
context is used by several different APIs (muxers/demuxers,
parsers, bitstream filters and encoders/decoders) simultaneously, with
there being no clear rules for who can modify what and the different
processes being typically delayed with respect to each other.
- avformat_find_stream_info() making it necessary to support opening
and closing a single codec context multiple times, thus
complicating the semantics of freeing various allocated objects in the
codec context.
Those problems are resolved by replacing the AVStream embedded codec
context with a newly added AVCodecParameters instance, which stores only
the stream parameters exported by the demuxers or read by the muxers.
With this change, the output is checked immediately after each test
has run. This means commands like "make regtest-mpeg2" can now be
used to run a single test and get meaningful results.
By default, make will abort if any test fails. To run all tests
regardless, use make -k.
Originally committed as revision 21254 to svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk
Anton Khirnov
Josh Allmann
Michael Niedermayer
Reimar Döffinger
Måns Rullgård