include ffmpeg-command in c++ program

Question

I have a c++ program that reads rendered images from shared-memory and writes them into a pipe(mkfifo), so that I can capture them with ffmpeg and stream them as live-video over ffserver. For my stream to work I have to start the program and the ffmpeg-command seperately. I asked myself if there isn't a possibility to include the ffmpeg into the program and avoid the pipe.

My ffmpeg command:

ffmpeg -re -f -rawvideo -s 800x600 -pix_fmt rgb24 -i myfifo http://localhost:8090/feed1.ffm

My question is:

What would be the best way to include the ffmpeg-command into the c++-program? Is there some other idea to improve this solution?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There are two ways:

The easier is to use system(), assuming you are in Linux, and launch the ffmpeg command.

if(system("ffmpeg -re -f -rawvideo -s 800x600 -pix_fmt rgb24 -i myfifo http://localhost:8090/feed1.ffm") != 0)
{
    cout << "ffmpeg failed..." << endl;
}

---

The difficult is to include the library in your project, and use it internally: Can FFmpeg be used as a library, instead of a standalone program? .

To start check out https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Using%20libav *, where it describes how to use libav (internal library used by ffmpeg), and I would recommend to follow the tutorial http://dranger.com/ffmpeg/tutorial01.html