Question

I’m trying to build an application using some of ffmpeg’s libraries and I’m noticing many data structures with the word "Context" in them.

You can see some here http://www.ffmpeg.org/doxygen/trunk/classes.html

I don’t understand the use of the word "context" in this.. context.

Any hints as to what it generally means?

Answer 1

Looking at documentations you provided it seems related to the context of a particolar codec so that every SomethingContext encapsulates

• the structs necessary for that particular codec (headers and so on)
• the available operations when wortking with that codec (which may vary according to the complexity of the codec itself)

something like “when working with H264..”