Does OpenCV really support FFmpeg 5.0+ on Windows?

[Chenwei-Ni]

System Information

// C# user
OpenCV version: 4.5.5
Operating System: Windows 10 Enterprise

Detailed description

My application uses VideoCapture to open a http video stream for images. And for robustness, I need to test the case when the http video stream is not available sometimes. While testing this case, I found that my program crashed. It is not a stably reproducible bug.

After debugging and investigation, I found that this issue was introduced in FFmpeg 4.3 and fixed in FFmpeg 5.0.

So, I tried to downgrade the OpenCV version to 4.4.0 which is with FFmpeg 4.2.3 and it works well. It will log invalid stream index but won't crash.

However, according to the change log of OpenCV, OpenCV supports FFmpeg 5.0+ since version 4.6.0. But that's not what I tested. It seemed that even OpenCV 4.9.0 is still with FFmpeg 4.4.

I don’t know exactly how OpenCV integrates with FFmpeg. I cannot tell which version of FFmpeg is integrated from below file:
opencv/3rdparty/ffmpeg/ffmpeg.cmake at 4.9.0 · opencv/opencv (github.com)

I just wonder does OpenCV really support FFmpeg 5.0+? If not, which version will it be supported in the future?

Steps to reproduce

My code like this:

var videoCapture = new VideoCapture();
while (!videoCapture.IsOpened()) videoCapture.Open(url);
receivingImgTask.Start();

Reproduce Step:
Disconnect the network cable to make the http video stream unavailable and reconnect.
Do above step several times and the application will crash.
It is hard to reproduce sometimes. maybe reproduced 5 times out of 50 reconnections.

Issue submission checklist

• I report the issue, it's not a question
• I checked the problem with documentation, FAQ, open issues, forum.opencv.org, Stack Overflow, etc and have not found any solution
• I updated to the latest OpenCV version and the issue is still there
• There is reproducer code and related data files (videos, images, onnx, etc)

[Siddharth-Latthe-07]

I guess, the problem lies in the version of the OS wherein the latest binaries are being installed, I read an article regarding the above, wherein the version of the OS, might play a role for Precompiled binaries of libraries (like the FFmpeg DLLs mentioned) are often built for specific OS versions or distributions. These binaries may rely on particular versions of system libraries that differ between OS versions. The opencv library do support ffmpeg 5.0
https://ffmpeg.org/documentation.html