[whartung]

What about domain sockets?

It's clumsier, to be sure, but if performance is your goal, the socket should be faster.

[AkBKukU]

It looks like FFmpeg does support reading from sockets natively[1], I didn't know that. That might be a better solution in this case, I'll have to look into some C code for writing my output to a socket to try that some time.

[1] https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-protocols.html#unix

[ptx]

Why should sockets be faster?

[uncanneyvalley]

Sockets remap pages without moving any data while pipes have to copy the data between fds.