Does FFMpeg have an option to limit the memory usage ?

[rajivrp]

Hi,

I am using the 64-bit version of FFMpeg 1.2, am trying to understand its memory usage, and put the RAM in that machine accordingly.

- Is there any option in FFMpeg to explicitly specific the memory usage range / limit ?

- If not, can it go up virtually to the amount of RAM you have depending on the video being processed ?

- If I am processing 1GB size video, would it be fair to assume it will take around same amount of memory to process it ?

Thanks,
Rajiv

[jagabo]

Why don't you just use Task Manager to monitor how much memory ffmpeg is using? The amount of memory it uses has little to do with the size of the file you're working with. I've never monitored it (I don't use it often) but I think you'll find it uses far less than 1 GB.

I just encoded a standard definition MPEG 2 source to h.264 with ffmpeg. It used about 120 MB of memory. While encoding a 1920x1080 source it went up to 630 MB. The amount it uses will vary depending on the frame size and encoding options selected.

Why do you care how much memory it's using?

[rajivrp]

I did it, monitored it in Task Manager, it seems to be varying video to video quite a lot.

Why I care about the memory is because I don't want FFMpeg to take up whatever memory is available in the system, there are other things running too which may get impacted or even go out-of-memory.

So I was just wondering if there's any such option in FFMpeg to explicitly specify the memory limit ... something like -Xms and -Xmx that Java has for example.

[Selur]

there is no such option in ffmpeg (or any other encoding tool I know of)

[rajivrp]

Thanks !