these buffered frames must be flushed immediately if a new input produces new the filter must not call request_frame to get more It must just process the frame or queue it The task of requesting more frames is left to the filter s request_frame method or the application If a filter has several the filter must be ready for frames arriving randomly on any input any filter with several inputs will most likely require some kind of queuing mechanism It is perfectly acceptable to have a limited queue and to drop frames when the inputs are too unbalanced request_frame For filters that do not use the this method is called when a frame is wanted on an output For a it should directly call filter_frame on the corresponding output For a if there are queued frames already one of these frames should be pushed If the filter should request a frame on one of its repeatedly until at least one frame has been pushed Return or at least make progress towards producing a frame
the frame and frame reference mechanism is intended to as much as expensive copies of that data while still allowing the filters to produce correct results The data is stored in buffers represented by AVFrame structures Several references can point to the same frame buffer