However when I try to add -c:v bmp' or '-c:v rawvideo', I had expected that the cpu usage would drop because no jpeg encoding would be required. Such BMP's are not useful for me, but it is a way to do a root cause analysis. To determine this, I tried this tip from StackOverflow, to use uncompressed BMP images. Not sure where all the cpu is being eaten:ĭoes it take lots of cpu time to find the I-frame in the stream for some reason?ĭoes it take lots of cpu time to encode the I-frame to a jpeg image? If I understand it correctly, image2pipe will extract only the I-frames from the stream, based on the PICT_TYPE_I argument. '+frag_keyframe+empty_moov+default_base_moof',īut I could not found decent information about image2pipe. Therefore I am still hoping that I do something wrong with my ffmpeg parameters, and that things can be improved. Very weird because I-frames are already complete image frames, so I am very surprised that it still consumes such a large amount of cpu. But I am quite flabbergasted about the amount of cpu being used for only 1 image per second on a Raspberry Pi 4:

Our ffmpeg guru already described here very clearly that HIGH CPU usage is normal for encoding jpegs (since no hardware acceleration is applicable). Almost no cpu usage!īut my troubles started when trying to extract the I-frames from my stream, for image processing. Handling the RTSP stream - from a cam that sends H.264 for video and AAC for audio - works like a charm, since no re-encoding is required.

Ffmpeg extract frames high quality