How to use named pipe with FFmpeg?

Tech QnA
1

I have written a video play in which it shows live video streams and encodes it into a mp4 file at same time. For that purpose I need to use a named pipe with FFmpeg. Is there any way I can use a named pipe with FFmpeg?

2

Using a named pipe with FFmpeg is very easy, you just need to create a named pipe using mkfifo command on a Linux-based distribution and you consume or provide output of FFmpeg in named pipes. Consider the following example.

ffmpeg -i live_stream_url -f mp4 pipe:1 > outpipe
ffmpeg -i outpipe -c copy -f mp4 output.mp4

3

Is there a Mac OS X equivalent of Windows’ named pipe like in Windows, I connect to a console programme using named pipes (ffmpeg). I attempted to rewrite this for the Mac and thought I had success, however neither FireMonkey nor even the OS X native code contains named pipe support. Does it even exist?

4

Reena, in that case you can use mkfifo to create named pipes and the alternative is Unix domain sockets, which are technically more effective because they are bidirectional.

5

agree!
 Or you can use lsof | grep PIPE if you wish to see the system pipes.

Cheers!