As I've already mentioned, a video file can contain several audio and video streams, and each of those streams is split up into packets of a particular size. Our job is to read these packets one by one using libavformat, filter out all those that aren't part of the video stream we're interested in, and hand them on to libavcodec for decoding. In doing this, we'll have to take care of the fact that the boundary between two frames can occur in the middle of a packet.
Sound complicated? Lucikly, we can encapsulate this whole process in a routine that simply returns the next video frame:
bool GetNextFrame(AVFormatContext *pFormatCtx, AVCodecContext *pCodecCtx,
int videoStream, AVFrame *pFrame)
{
static AVPacket packet;
static int bytesRemaining=0;
static uint8_t *rawData;
static bool fFirstTime=true;
int bytesDecoded;
int frameFinished;
// First time we're called, set packet.data to NULL to indicate it
// doesn't have to be freed
if(fFirstTime)
{
fFirstTime=false;
packet.data=NULL;
}
// Decode packets until we have decoded a complete frame
while(true)
{
// Work on the current packet until we have decoded all of it
while(bytesRemaining > 0)
{
// Decode the next chunk of data
bytesDecoded=avcodec_decode_video(pCodecCtx, pFrame,
&frameFinished, rawData, bytesRemaining);
// Was there an error?
if(bytesDecoded < 0)
{
fprintf(stderr, "Error while decoding frame\n");
return false;
}