ffmpeg-libav-tutorial VS digital_video_introduction

The FFmpeg libraries are possibly the worst thing I have ever worked with in my life. I have never been more afraid to use a library than this one. This tutorial is very outdated, eg. `AVPicture`, which is used throughout, is completely deprecated and removed from the library, so you will simply encounter linker errors trying to follow this tutorial.

FFmpeg libraries randomly break themselves, so if you find an answer from a few years ago, chances are it's useless. Want to free an AVPacket? `av_free_packet` is deprecated,. You can use `av_packet_unref` (but there's _also_ a function named `av_packet_free` that doesn't do quite the same thing).

Most questions on Stack Overflow or related platforms have no replies, the library has literally zero documentation, it has very little error handling, which means if you're a bad C developer like me you are required to recompile FFmpeg with debugging information unstripped so you can trace segfaults in gdb.

https://github.com/leandromoreira/ffmpeg-libav-tutorial/ is a better and more up-to-date tutorial than this one.

I found this . I think you need an older version of ffmpeg to use the program, try to write it under the AUR to see if the mantainer is still active and knows the problem.

I think you're supposed to read the header files? I have no idea how people write ffmpeg stuff. The only good tutorial I've seen is: https://github.com/leandromoreira/ffmpeg-libav-tutorial

Much of it I learned from An ffmpeg and SDL Tutorial (outdated, but the core idea persists), and from ffmpeg-libav-tutorial.

https://github.com/leandromoreira/ffmpeg-libav-tutorial#learn-ffmpeg-libav-the-hard-way

If you are not familiar with libav, ffmpeg-libav-tutorial is a great introduction.

Try this tutorial: https://github.com/leandromoreira/ffmpeg-libav-tutorial

Btw, if you want to encode anything higher than 1080p60 using the Videocore VI, you'll need to use an external library like ffmpeg. There is a good tutorial for ffmpeg too - https://github.com/leandromoreira/ffmpeg-libav-tutorial . This should teach you how to encode the raw video stream you get from the camera into a codec of your choice.

There's a great introduction to video tech, including codecs, at https://github.com/leandromoreira/digital_video_introduction

A couple of AV centric scenarios I'd explore: - Set up two speakers fed with a mono signal, flip the phase on one and have students move around the area. From this introduce constructive and destructive interference and some basic acoustics. - Using an oscilloscope (or just prepped graphics) show a sine wave on an unbalanced line, how this is paired with an inverted copy of itself on a balanced line, and how this works to cancel transmission noise. - With an analogue signal now pictured, introduce analogue to digital conversion and what sample rate and bit depth mean. From this you can also start to introduce why gain staging is important in both pure analogue systems and those where you're bouncing between analogue and digital domains. - Introduce video: colour channels, different ways of representing colour and some (very surface level) compression basics like chroma subsampling. Really good resource for that here. - Introduce base patterns for getting any signals arounds: dedicated circuits (analogue audio, HDMI video, RS-232 control, logic IO) and network based (again for audio, video, and control). Dive intro signal flow, how to read a schematic and where reasoning about each of these modes differs.

If you want to keep digging from there, get familiar with the compression on NVX, JPEG-XS, and how it behaves. intoPIX are the upstream vendor that do some of the NVX internals and have some great resources on that here: https://www.intopix.com/jpeg-xs. For a guide on all things digital video I also highly recommend https://github.com/leandromoreira/digital_video_introduction.

Edit: After finishing writing the comment, I realized that it was more technical than I intended, and assumes that the reader has a basic to medium understanding of video compression. If not, I recommend this writeup/tutorial of digital video, especially the section about frame types.

A good high-level breakdown of H.264: https://sidbala.com/h-264-is-magic/

Associated HN post (although there have been a few): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30710574

More technical: https://github.com/leandromoreira/digital_video_introduction...

For those interested in this topic, I highly recommend the approachable but more extensive technical introduction at https://github.com/leandromoreira/digital_video_introduction

Go look at this. https://github.com/leandromoreira/digital_video_introduction