shan-ge / ffmpeg-cpp

A clean, easy-to-use C++ wrapper around the ffmpeg libraries

ffmpeg-cpp

A clean C++ wrapper around the ffmpeg libraries. Makes the most commonly used functionality of FFmpeg easily available for any C++ projects with an easy-to-use interface. The full power of FFmpeg compacted in 10 lines of C++ code: if this sounds useful to you, read on!

Installation

Build in your machine

Windows

1. Clone the repository
2. Update submodule for vcpkg
3. Run build-dependencies.bat to build ffmpeg in your machine
4. Run build-libraries.bat to build this library
   • This will create a build directory. The visual studio project files will be inside the folder.
   • Add --build-examples option while executing build-libraries.bat to build examples and demo, which will be inside build\examples folder

This will build a .lib file that you can use in your own C++ projects. It will also generate an include-folder in the repo root that you can add to your include folders in your own project.

Linux

1. Clone the repository
2. Update submodule for vcpkg
3. Run ./build-all.sh build-dependencies.sh to build ffmpeg in your machine
4. Run ./build-all.sh build-libraries.sh to build this library
   • This will create a build directory, and all the binaries will be inside the directory.
   • Add --build-examples option while executing build-libraries.sh to build examples and demo, which will be inside build\examples folder

Usage

There are multiple demo projects included in the solution. Check out the demo-project for a thorough exploration of the features (demuxing, decoding, filtering, encoding, muxing) or one of the other examples for a simpler example to follow.

To give you an idea, this code will load a video stream from a container, filter it, and write it back out to another container:

// Create a muxer that will output the video as MP4.
Muxer* muxer = new Muxer("filtered_video.mp4");

// Create a MPEG2 codec that will encode the raw data.
VideoCodec* codec = new VideoCodec(AV_CODEC_ID_MPEG2VIDEO);

// Create an encoder that will encode the raw audio data using the codec specified above.
// Tie it to the muxer so it will be written to file.
VideoEncoder* encoder = new VideoEncoder(codec, muxer);

// Create a video filter and do some funny stuff with the video data.
Filter* filter = new Filter("scale=640:150,transpose=cclock,vignette", encoder);

// Load a container. Pick the best video stream container in the container
// And send it to the filter.
Demuxer* demuxer = new Demuxer("big_buck_bunny.mp4");
demuxer->DecodeBestVideoStream(filter);

// Prepare the output pipeline.
// This will decode a small amount of frames so the pipeline can configure itself.
demuxer->PreparePipeline();

// Push all the remaining frames through.
while (!demuxer->IsDone())
{
	demuxer->Step();
}
		
// Save everything to disk by closing the muxer.
muxer->Close();

Why?

I developed this project to be able to to integrate FFmpeg into our program without having to call the executable to do an operation. This is important because starting up an external executable tends to be blocked by antivirus software and can cause issues with users. It has been tested for the most common functionality, and some of the examples from https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/tree/master/doc/examples are mirrored in the project as well.

Roadmap

• Add Linux/Mac build support
• Audio filtering
• Adding proper unit tests
• Testing with more codecs, containers

License

This library is licensed under LGPL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License).

Please note though that FFmpeg, which you will need to build this library, is not. Depending on how you build it, it is either LGPL or GPL. So once you use the LGPL-version of FFmpeg in your project, this library will be GPL too.

TODO

• Make a folder test
• Make a folder test/unittests
• Start writing unittests
  • Start with FrameContainer unittest