Derrick Petzold

I needed to collect the output from ffmpeg for some profiling. It proved more challenging than I anticipated as ffmpeg writes the data unflushed to stderr making it unreadable using stdio. To get the data the stderr file descriptor has to set to NONBLOCK using fcntl. Here is the resulting Python code.

sample.py

def encode(filename, callback=None):
    cmd = 'ffmpeg -i "%s" -acodec libfaac -ab 128kb ' + \
          '-vcodec mpeg4 -b 1200kb -mbd 2 -flags +4mv ' + \
          '-trellis 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -s 320x180 "%s.mp4"'
    pipe = subprocess.Popen(
        shlex.split(cmd % (filename, os.path.splitext(filename)[0])),
        stderr=subprocess.PIPE,
        close_fds=True
    )
    fcntl.fcntl(
        pipe.stderr.fileno(),
        fcntl.F_SETFL,
        fcntl.fcntl(pipe.stderr.fileno(), fcntl.F_GETFL) | os.O_NONBLOCK,
    )
    # frame=   29 fps=  0 q=2.6 size=     114kB time=0.79 bitrate=1181.0kbits/s
    reo = re.compile("""\S+\s+(?P<frame>d+)  # frame
                         \s\S+\s+(?P<fps>\d+)           # fps
                         \sq=(?P<q>\S+)                    # q
                         \s\S+\s+(?P<size>\S+)          # size
                         \stime=(?P<time>\S+)           # time
                         \sbitrate=(?P<bitrate>[\d\.]+) # bitrate
                         """, re.X)
    while True:
        readx = select.select([pipe.stderr.fileno()], [], [])[0]
        if readx:
            chunk = pipe.stderr.read()
            if chunk == '':
                break
            m = reo.match(chunk)
            if m and callback:
                callback(m.groupdict())
        time.sleep(.1)