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.
Many of these functions were named foo_free_context, and since
the functions no longer should free the context itself, only
allocated elements within it, the previous naming was slightly
misleading.
Signed-off-by: Martin Storsjö <martin@martin.st>
This makes it more consistent with depacketizers that don't have any
.free function at all, where the payload context is freed by the
surrounding framework. Always free the context in the surrounding
framework, having the individual depacketizers only free any data
they've specifically allocated themselves.
This is similar to how this works for demuxer/muxers/codecs - a
component shouldn't free the priv_data that the framework has
allocated for it.
Signed-off-by: Martin Storsjö <martin@martin.st>
This makes the returned data valid to stream copy into other
containers as well, not only for decoding straight away.
Signed-off-by: Martin Storsjö <martin@martin.st>
This avoids exposing a dummy AVStream which won't get any data
and which will make avformat_find_stream_info wait for info about
this stream.
Signed-off-by: Martin Storsjö <martin@martin.st>
All current usages of it are incompatible with localization.
For example strcasecmp("i", "I") != 0 is possible, but would
break many of the places where it is used.
Instead use our own implementations that always treat the data
as ASCII.
Signed-off-by: Martin Storsjö <martin@martin.st>