zmq - FFmpeg 5.1.6 / Filters / Multimedia

Receive commands sent through a libzmq client, and forward them to filters in the filtergraph.

zmq and azmq work as a pass-through filters. zmq must be inserted between two video filters, azmq between two audio filters. Both are capable to send messages to any filter type.

To enable these filters you need to install the libzmq library and headers and configure FFmpeg with --enable-libzmq.

For more information about libzmq see: http://www.zeromq.org/

The zmq and azmq filters work as a libzmq server, which receives messages sent through a network interface defined by the bind_address (or the abbreviation "b") option. Default value of this option is tcp://localhost:5555. You may want to alter this value to your needs, but do not forget to escape any ’:’ signs (see filtergraph escaping).

The received message must be in the form:

TARGET COMMAND [ARG]

TARGET specifies the target of the command, usually the name of the filter class or a specific filter instance name. The default filter instance name uses the pattern Parsed_<filter_name>_<index>, but you can override this by using the filter_name@id syntax (see Filtergraph syntax).

COMMAND specifies the name of the command for the target filter.

ARG is optional and specifies the optional argument list for the given COMMAND.

Upon reception, the message is processed and the corresponding command is injected into the filtergraph. Depending on the result, the filter will send a reply to the client, adopting the format:

ERROR_CODE ERROR_REASON
MESSAGE

MESSAGE is optional.

Examples

Look at tools/zmqsend for an example of a zmq client which can be used to send commands processed by these filters.

Consider the following filtergraph generated by ffplay. In this example the last overlay filter has an instance name. All other filters will have default instance names.

ffplay -dumpgraph 1 -f lavfi "
color=s=100x100:c=red  [l];
color=s=100x100:c=blue [r];
nullsrc=s=200x100, zmq [bg];
[bg][l]   overlay     [bg+l];
[bg+l][r] overlay@my=x=100 "

To change the color of the left side of the video, the following command can be used:

echo Parsed_color_0 c yellow | tools/zmqsend

To change the right side:

echo Parsed_color_1 c pink | tools/zmqsend

To change the position of the right side:

echo overlay@my x 150 | tools/zmqsend