A framework for multimedia playback and analysis of MPEG-2 videos with FFmpeg
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Computer Science—the theory, representation, processing, communication and use of information—is fundamentally transforming every aspect of human endeavor. The Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University advances computational and information sciences through; 1. educational and research programs within and beyond the university; 2. active engagement to help define national and international research, and 3. educational agendas, and sustained commitment to graduating leaders for academia, industry and government.
History
The Computer Science Department was officially established in 1969, with Robert Stewart serving as the founding Department Chair. Faculty were composed of joint appointments with Mathematics, Statistics, and Electrical Engineering. In 1969, the building which now houses the Computer Science department, then simply called the Computer Science building, was completed. Later it was named Atanasoff Hall. Throughout the 1980s to present, the department expanded and developed its teaching and research agendas to cover many areas of computing.
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1969-present
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- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (parent college)
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Abstract
Fast Forward Motion Pictures Expert Group (FFmpeg) is a well-known, high performance, cross platform open source library for recording, streaming, and playback of video and audio in various formats, namely, Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG), H.264, Audio Video Interleave (AVI), just to name a few. With FFmpeg current licensing options, it is also suitable for both open source and commercial software development. FFmpeg contains over 100 open source codecs for video encoding and decoding.
Given the complexities of MPEG standards, FFmpeg still lacks a framework for (1) seeking to a particular image frame in a video, which is needed for accurate annotation at the frame level for applications in fields such as medical domain, digital communications and commercial video broadcasting and (2) motion vectors extraction for analysis of motion patterns in video content. Most importantly, FFmpeg code base is not well documented, which has raised a significant difficulty for developing an extension.
As our contributions, we extended FFmpeg code base to include new APIs and libraries support accurate frame-level seek, motion vector extraction, and MPEG-2 video encoding/decoding. We documented FFmpeg MPEG-2 codec to facilitate future software development. We evaluated the performance of our implementation against a high-performance third-party commercial software development kit on videos captured from television broadcasts and from endoscopy procedures. To evaluate the usability of our libraries, we integrated them with some commercial applications. In the following sections, we will discuss our software architecture, important implementation details, performance evaluation results, and lessons learned.