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authorHendrik Leppkes <h.leppkes@gmail.com>2015-10-23 13:54:25 +0200
committerHendrik Leppkes <h.leppkes@gmail.com>2015-10-27 10:19:05 +0100
commit31741aecbf9938194b25f14de434104be33f5809 (patch)
treeb7392b272fdc5ddc4b60f312f0c0f33e09635bf5 /libavcodec/dct32.h
parentaf71c73fb42f4467701073cddd30002730e79c92 (diff)
downloadffmpeg-31741aecbf9938194b25f14de434104be33f5809.tar.gz
avcodec: disallow hwaccel with frame threads
HWAccels with frame threads are fundamentally flawed in avcodecs current design, and there are several known problems ranging from image corruption to driver crashes. These problems come down to two design problems in the interaction of threads and HWAccel decoding: (1) While avcodec prevents parallel decoding and as such simultaneous access to the hardware accelerator from the decoding threads, it cannot account for the user code and its access to the hardware surfaces and the hardware itself. This can result in image corruption or even driver crashes if the user code locks image surfaces while they are being used by the decoder threads as reference frames. The current HWAccel API does not offer any way to ensure exclusive access to the hardware or the surfaces if frame threading is used. (2) Initialization of the HWAccel with frame threads is non-trivial, and many decoders had and still have issues that cause excess calls to the get_format callback. This will potentially cause duplicate HWAccel initialization, which in extreme cases can even lead to driver crashes if the HWAccel is re-initialized while the user code is actively accessing the hardware surfaces associated with it, or lead to image corruption due to lost reference frames. While both of these issues are solvable, fixing (1) would at least require a huge API redesign which would move a lot of complexity into the user code. The only reason the combination of frame threads and HWAccel was considered useful is to allow a seamless fallback to multi-threaded software decoding if the HWAccel is not available, however the issues outlined above far outweigh this. The proper solution for a fallback is to re-open the AVCodecContext with threading enabled if the HWAccel failed, which is a practice commonly used by various user applications using avcodec today already. Reviewed-by: Gwenole Beauchesne <gb.devel@gmail.com> Reviewed-by: wm4 <nfxjfg@googlemail.com> Signed-off-by: Hendrik Leppkes <h.leppkes@gmail.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'libavcodec/dct32.h')
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