I just started working for a new company and my new role demands that I help debug the video corruption that they are receiving through decoding frames. As much as I intend on digging down deep into the code and looking into the specifics of my problem, it made me think about video debugging in general.
Since handling videos is very new to me, the whole process seems pretty complex and it seems there are a lot of places for corruption to present itself. The way I see it there is at least three places where corruption could pop up (barring memory corruption from the machine):
- Transporting the data before it is decoded
- decoding implementation that perpetuates corruption once it is encountered, or is all together incorrect (Which seems to be my problem)
- Transportation to the monitor(which seems unlikely but possible)
So what i'm really curious about is if/how people debug their video streams to determine the location of any potential corruption they are encountering. I'm sure there is no sure fire method but I am curious to see what problems are even possible and how they can be identified and triaged.
P.S. - I'm not sure of the differences between different decoding methods but, if this question seems too vague maybe it helps to mention I am using ffmpeg and avcodec_decode_video2 for the decoding.
