webm encoding slower through av than from command line

[thomasp85]

It appears encoding to webm is much slower when done through av, compared to calling ffmpeg directly from the command-line. This is only a difference for the webm format as mp4 has the same encoding time no matter how you call it...

pngfile <- tempfile(fileext = '.png')
webmfile <- tempfile(fileext = '.webm')
mp4file <- tempfile(fileext = '.mp4')
png(pngfile)
plot(1:10, 1:10)
dev.off()
#> quartz_off_screen 
#>                 2
system.time(av::av_encode_video(rep(pngfile, 100), output = webmfile))
#>    user  system elapsed 
#>  11.214   0.073  11.321
system.time(av::av_encode_video(rep(pngfile, 100), output = mp4file))
#>    user  system elapsed 
#>   0.957   0.066   0.467

^{Created on 2018-12-11 by the reprex package (v0.2.1)}

[jeroen]

Thanks. Some hypotheses:

• The webm codec has a quality parameter that I'm setting to max
• The command line uses hardware encoding or multithreading
• My code is applying unnecessary filters somewhere.

[thomasp85]

Hmm... constructing a minimal equivalent system call seems to make the difference much smaller than I experienced through gganimate... It is still there, but not as extreme

pngfile <- tempfile(fileext = '.png')
webmfile <- tempfile(fileext = '.webm')
mp4file <- tempfile(fileext = '.mp4')
png(pngfile)
plot(1:10, 1:10)
dev.off()
#> quartz_off_screen 
#>                 2
system.time(av::av_encode_video(rep(pngfile, 100), output = webmfile))
#>    user  system elapsed 
#>  11.516   0.078  11.706
system.time(av::av_encode_video(rep(pngfile, 100), output = mp4file))
#>    user  system elapsed 
#>   0.760   0.057   0.368

pngfiles <- sprintf(paste0(file.path(tempdir(), 'file'), '%04d.png'), seq_len(100))
file.copy(pngfile, pngfiles)
#>   [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
#>  [15] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
#>  [29] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
#>  [43] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
#>  [57] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
#>  [71] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
#>  [85] TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
#>  [99] TRUE TRUE
glob <- file.path(dirname(pngfiles[1]), sub('^.*(\\..+$)', 'file%4d\\1', basename(pngfiles[1])))

system.time(system2(
  'ffmpeg', 
  c("-pattern_type sequence",
    paste0('-i ', glob),
    '-y',
    webmfile
)))
#>    user  system elapsed 
#>  14.822   0.127   8.186

^{Created on 2018-12-11 by the reprex package (v0.2.1)}

[jeroen]

Can you compare if the two different outputs have the same bitrate / quality parameters?

[thomasp85]

what settings do I need to set on the command line to ensure the same quality as default av?

[jeroen]

I would think they use the same defaults, but perhaps the command line is overriding this. You can try the ffprobe command line util on both video files to check the bitrate (or av::av_video_info)

[thomasp85]

av's default bitrate is x20 of using the command line (32 kb/s vs 664 kb/s) so this might indeed be the reason

[jeroen]

We probably need something like this but then for webm:

https://github.com/ropensci/av/blob/f54806d3527f4379e0f59cbabafb81328a59c193/src/video.c#L301-L304

[thomasp85]

I think if it is just because av chooses a higher quality default setting, then it is not a problem... I was more worried that av was doing some unnecessary work of some sort that resulted in a slowdown

[jeroen]

Well it's still nice to get it sorted out to use a sensible default.

[jeroen]

If I add -b:v 0 to the command line as recommended here the speed is quite similar as in av. 🤔