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I was trying to do some basic profiling on ffmpeg, following my previous question here. I have a relatively high-bitrate .ts file (17mbps), and I have two versions of ffmpeg (2017.3 and 2019.4), and tried to run a decoding process (blackdetect filter) on both of them. I notice the 2019 version is at least 2.2 times faster. More especifically, execution of the following command takes 2.2x faster on the 2019 version:

ffmpeg -i in.ts -vf blackdetect=d=0.1:pix_th=.1 -f rawvideo -y null

Is this really expected? Is there a known, major performance improvement on ffmpeg that wasn't there in 2017 version? If that's really the case, updating my ffmpeg core should really make it run faster!

EDIT: File is H264 encoded, but relatively higher bitrate. I actually compiled both ffmpeg versions from source code with same build options. If it is decoding improvement, that's something very interesting.

The 2019 ffmpeg command output:

ffmpeg version N-94171-g0cbdedb Copyright (c) 2000-2019 the FFmpeg developers
  built with gcc 5.4.0 (Ubuntu 5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.11) 20160609
  configuration: --prefix=/home/user/usr/local --enable-shared
  libavutil      56. 30.100 / 56. 30.100
  libavcodec     58. 53.101 / 58. 53.101
  libavformat    58. 28.101 / 58. 28.101
  libavdevice    58.  7.100 / 58.  7.100
  libavfilter     7. 56.100 /  7. 56.100
  libswscale      5.  4.101 /  5.  4.101
  libswresample   3.  4.100 /  3.  4.100
Hyper fast Audio and Video encoder
usage: ffmpeg [options] [[infile options] -i infile]... {[outfile options] outfile}...

And the 2017 output:

ffmpeg version 3.2.4 Copyright (c) 2000-2017 the FFmpeg developers
  built with gcc 5.4.0 (Ubuntu 5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.11) 20160609
  configuration: --prefix=bin --bindir=bin
  libavutil      55. 34.101 / 55. 34.101
  libavcodec     57. 64.101 / 57. 64.101
  libavformat    57. 56.101 / 57. 56.101
  libavdevice    57.  1.100 / 57.  1.100
  libavfilter     6. 65.100 /  6. 65.100
  libswscale      4.  2.100 /  4.  2.100
  libswresample   2.  3.100 /  2.  3.100
Hyper fast Audio and Video encoder
usage: ffmpeg [options] [[infile options] -i infile]... {[outfile options] outfile}...

EDIT 2:

Full log for ffmpeg -i in.ts -t 100 -benchmark -an -f null -: 2019 and 2017

|improve this question
  • 1
    This is very vague question. FFmpeg get various performance improvements all the time. You haven't provided enough info to answer you question. – Paul B. Mahol Aug 13 at 12:56
  • Added the command. Curious why we see this huge improvement. – Tina J Aug 13 at 15:44
  • The blackdetect filter haven't changed much at all in that period. Maybe file have codecs which decoders are received major speed improvements. Or it is build issue, for example one build was compiled with asm support and other haven't. For more info post ffmpeg output of both builds. – Paul B. Mahol Aug 14 at 10:35
  • 1
    Just what ffmpeg output when its run without arguments. – Paul B. Mahol Aug 15 at 14:59
  • 1
    Share full log for ffmpeg -i in.ts -t 100 -benchmark -an -f null - with both versions. – Gyan Aug 20 at 8:50

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