Size of 1080p frame too large

[learnermaxRL]

Hi I am trying to extract frames from rtsp stream which streams h264 stream using ffmpeg,each frame size is around 6 mb when read from pipe using image2pipe,however if i save this using mjpeg codec as .jpg file size is in range 0.5 mb,can you tell me a way to continuously pipe 1080p frames of this size using ffmpeg?

[kkroening]

I'm not sure what you're asking. What are you piping it to?

I think what you're saying is that you're concerned about streaming large amounts of raw data and wanting to compress it in hopes of making things more efficient, but if you're piping it into something on the same host that needs to decode it again, then compressing it is just a waste of compute power. Unix pipes are meant to be fast, so piping raw frames from one process to another is fine. If you're saving it to permanent storage then it makes sense to compress it, otherwise pipe it raw.

But don't take my word for it: try it, and profile the performance difference. If you don't have a way to profile it, then I would suggest starting there, because otherwise your optimization efforts are just a shot in the dark.

[kkroening]

if you're piping it into something on the same host that needs to decode it again [...] pipe it raw.

But do be careful to avoid loading the data into a python memory buffer unless you actually need to. If you're loading the data into memory in python just to send it out verbatim to another pipe that goes to some other process, it's extra work that can be avoided if you connect ffmpeg directly to the other process (i.e. by connecting ffmpeg's stdout to the stdin of the other process).

Also beware of deadlocks.