Potential move back to FFmpeg

[matanui159]

Hello, y'all!

First let me start by saying sorry for being mostly silent on this project. Between university, work, and other side projects I have been interesting in working on, I haven't had much time to work on this, but I still consider it "active" as in I haven't given up on it, just haven't had the time or energy lately.

When I started this project, I wrote it around FFmpeg so I could take advantage of hardware encoding. However, when I find major performance issues with hardware encoding while playing games, I decided to switch to software-based JPEG encoding. The FFmpeg JPEG encoder was not that good, I used libjpeg-turbo, I thought why depend on FFmpeg when I don't even use it for encoding, big mistakes.

Turns out writing frame-timing, buffering, reencoding, etc. yourself when theres an amazing library out there to do it all for you is not that smart of an idea.

Now that I have had some more time to look back at it and look into the issues that are starting to pile up, I thought maybe I should switch it back. I would probably still use libjpeg-turbo for now, just find some way to integrate it into FFmpeg's pipeline.

It would bring along many benefits:

• Mulitple audio streams (#32)
• Fix timing issues (#15, #31)
• Alternative output options (#29, #9)
• Cleaner, smaller and simpler code (most of it will be handled by FFmpeg)
• If I ever want to port to other systems, it will be alot easier (I don't think theres replay software for mac?)
• Less dependencies. I can just depend on FFmpeg which is included in basically all Linux systems, and don't have to depend on X11, minimp4, x264, sdl2, fdk-aac. Still gonna depend on libjpeg-turbo (for now) and libbacktrace (cause its coolio)
• Maybe I can look back at hardware encoding and figure out what went wrong?

Issues:

• Mostly gonna be a rewrite. Probably in another branch. Gonna try and keep what I can from the current code but alot of it will probably go away or be changed heavily.

Just gonna put this here as a collection of thoughts, might wait on it till I have some more time to focus on this project however.

[matanui159]

Some updates on the current rewrite:

• work is being done on the ffmpeg branch
• I made a FFmpeg Rewrite project board which I will try to keep updated
• Got the core video encoding and saving working right now, currently only x264 software encoding is supported

Some changes during the rewrite:

• There is only one config file now (by default /usr/local/etc/replay-sorcery.conf)
• Alot of the config options have changed
• I currently don't have libjpeg-turbo implemented. I might still add it in the future but the default options I have for x264 are fast enough and I do want to have a crack at adding hardware encoding via kmsgrab
• I did end up half-depending on certain things like X11. It is not required but is used to detect extra information like screen size. You can still compile without it and explicitly specify the screen size and use the "debug" control method. I will do something similar for any other dependencies (not required but adds features).

If anyone wants to check out the progress so far, feel free to pull down the branch, build and run it. Let me know if you find any issues early on, I'll try to keep the branch in a working state.

[matanui159]

The FFmpeg rewrite has been merged and a new release has been tagged so hopefully nothing major goes wrong :)