FFmpeg and x264 in streaming

[Michael Rampe]

I hadn’t heard about this named piping technique but it looks interesting.

After a quick look, this seems both complicated and well documented but I will give you a quick rundown.

Basically:

#FFmpeg –> named pipe (fifo) –> x264

FFmpeg decodes the video stream to raw data and passes it to a named pipe.
x264 inputs this named pipe and exports raw data.

I am assuming (possibly incorrectly) that you then have to pass this raw stream back to FFmpeg to put in a container, for example, mp4.

#FFmpeg –> named pipe –> x264 –> named pipe –> FFmpeg

Of course, you will probably want audio with your video as well and x264 is not an audio encoder;-) Best to split that whilst decompressing the original stream and map back in after the video has been encoded with x264.

#FFmpeg –> named pipe –> x264 –> named pipe –> FFmpeg
#FFmpeg————-> named pipe (audio)—————>/

You can always just run the commands concatenated (one by one) instead if you are not too concerned by time.
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/291/70

I will look into it further.

Good luck for now.

Michael

“half-way to world domination A.K.A. the belligerent blue bike shed”

[Nayan Kapadia]

Thank you very much. I will try this. Do you have any luck in this matter?

Thank you,
Nayan Kapadia

[Michael Rampe]

Haven’t looked into this specific use but have been using named pipes for another project so I will look into it now.

Basically what worked for me is:

First create the named pipe with the proper extension:
$ mkfifo fifo.y4m

Then run both processes at once:
$ x264 –quiet –crf 18 -o video.264 fifo.y4m & \
ffmpeg -i funny_bubbles.mov -pix_fmt yuv420p -an \
-f yuv4mpegpipe – > fifo.y4m fifo.y4m < /dev/null Then remove the fifo: $ rm fifo.y4m You could also write a simple *sh script to do them all at once. Good luck. Michael "half-way to world domination A.K.A. the belligerent blue bike shed"

[Nayan Kapadia]

Thanks for your reply and support.I am working on windows and also i need h.264 output format and .ts file container. So i am confused how to make this work for windows.If you have any idea for this?

Thanks
NBK