Preserving frame meta data during encoding

[nadav]

Is there a way to keep some frame meta data that will not be encoded with the frame during encoding process, so that this meta data will be available with the frame after decoding process?
minimally it could be some frame ID that will help me associate some user meta data with specific frame.
thanks,
Nadav 

[celli4]

Nadav,

You might think about whether the frame time stamps could be used to de-reference your per-frame meta data. There is a lot of discussions about the frame time stamps on th forums at the moment.

[nadav]

Thanks for the advice
I've tried using frame time stamp, but it seems that it is not written to a file as part of the frame's data.
i'm looking for a way to "mark" frames with some unique key (before encoding) that will be saved with the frame to a standard h264 file after
encoding process, and will also be available with the frame - after reading the frame from the file and decoding it.
any ideas?

[Petter_L_Intel]

Hi,

Timestamp is the recommended approach for keeping track of frames. But keep in mind that timestamps corresponding with compressed frames (or audio samples for that matter) are normally not stored in the bitstream but instead in a media container such as mp4, mkv, avi etc.

So the recommended approach would be for you to mux timestamp and frames into a container of your choice. Note that Media SDK does not provide muxing or demuxing capabilities so you will have ot rely on other framework, such as FFmpeg. For an example on to do this you can check out the Media SDK Tutorial samples here: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-media-sdk-tutorial

Regards,
Petter