mpv has a very weak and very annoying policy that determines whether a
playlist should be used or not. For example, if you play a remote
playlist, you usually don't want it to be able to read local filesystem
entries. (Although for a media player the impact is small I guess.)
It's weak and annoying as in that it does not prevent certain cases
which could be interpreted as bad in some cases, such as allowing
playlists on the local filesystem to reference remote URLs. It probably
barely makes sense, but we just want to exclude some other "definitely
not a good idea" things, all while playlists generally just work, so
whatever.
The policy is:
- from the command line anything is played
- local playlists can reference anything except "unsafe" streams
("unsafe" means special stream inputs like libavfilter graphs)
- remote playlists can reference only remote URLs
- things like "memory://" and archives are "transparent" to this
This commit does... something. It replaces the weird stream flags with a
slightly clearer "origin" value, which is now consequently passed down
and used everywhere. It fixes some deviations from the described policy.
I wanted to force archives to reference only content within them, but
this would probably have been more complicated (or required different
abstractions), and I'm too lazy to figure it out, so archives are now
"transparent" (playlists within archives behave the same outside).
There may be a lot of bugs in this.
This is unfortunately a very noisy commit because:
- every stream open call now needs to pass the origin
- so does every demuxer open call (=> params param. gets mandatory)
- most stream were changed to provide the "origin" value
- the origin value needed to be passed along in a lot of places
- I was too lazy to split the commit
Fixes: #7274
This partially reverts commit a9d83eac40
("Remove optical disc fancification layers").
Mostly due to the timestamp crap, this was never really going to work.
The playback layer is sensitive to timestamps, and derives the playback
time directly from the low level packet timestamps. DVD/BD works
differently, and libdvdnav/libbluray do not make it easy at all to
compensate for this. Which is why it never worked well, but not doing it
at all is even more awful.
demux_disc.c tried this and rewrote packet timestamps from low level TS
to playback time. So restore demux_disc.c, which should bring behavior
back to the old often non-working but slightly better state.
I did not revert anything that affects components above the demuxer
layer. For example, the properties for switching DVD angles or listing
disc titles are still gone. (Disc titles could be reimplemented as
editions. But not by me.)
This commit modifies the reverted code a bit; this can't be avoided,
because the internal API changed quite a bit. The old seek resync in
demux_lavf.c (which was a hack) is replaced with a hack. SEEK_FORCE and
demux_params.external_stream are new additions.
Some of this could/should be further cleaned up. If you don't want
"proper" DVD/BD support to disappear, you should probably volunteer.
Now why am I wasting my time for this? Just because some idiot users are
too lazy to rip their ever-wearing out shitty physical discs? Then why
should I not be lazy and drop support completely? They won't even be
thankful for me maintaining this horrible garbage for no compensation.
Before this commit, EDL or CUE files did not properly enable the cache
if they were on "slow" media (stream->streaming==true). This happened
because the stream is unset for demux_timeline, so the streaming flag
could not be queried anymore.
Fix this by adding this flag to struct demuxer, and propagate it exactly
like the is_network flag. is_network is not used for checking the cache
options anymore, and its main function seems to be something else.
Normal http streams set the streaming flag already.
This should fix#6958.
Helper for the ab-loop-dump-cache command, see manpage additions.
This is kind of shit. Not only is this a very "special" feature, but it
also vomits more messy code into the big and already bloated demux.c,
and the implementation is sort of duplicated with the dump-cache code.
(Except it's different.) In addition, the results sort of depend what a
video player would do with the dump-cache output, or what the user wants
(for example, a user might be more interested in the range of output
audio, instead of the video).
But hey, I don't actually need to justify it. I'm only justifying it for
fun.
That's right, and it's probably not the end of it. I'll just claim that
I have no idea how to create a proper user interface for this, so I'm
creating multiple partially-orthogonal, of which some may work better in
each of its special use cases.
Until now, there was --record-file. You get relatively good control
about what is muxed, and it can use the cache. But it sucks that it's
bound to playback. If you pause while it's set, muxing stops. If you
seek while it's set, the output will be sort-of trashed, and that's by
design.
Then --stream-record was added. This is a bit better (especially for
live streams), but you can't really control well when muxing stops or
ends. In particular, it can't use the cache (it just dumps whatever the
underlying demuxer returns).
Today, the idea is that the user should just be able to select a time
range to dump to a file, and it should not affected by the user seeking
around in the cache. In addition, the stream may still be running, so
there's some need to continue dumping, even if it's redundant to
--stream-record.
One notable thing is that it uses the async command shit. Not sure
whether this is a good idea. Maybe not, but whatever. Also, a user can
always use the "async" prefix to pretend it doesn't.
Much of this was barely tested (especially the reinterleaving crap),
let's just hope it mostly works. I'm sure you can tolerate the one or
other crash?
Somewhat similar to the old --cache-file, except for the demuxer cache.
Instead of keeping packet data in memory, it's written to disk and read
back when needed.
The idea is to reduce main memory usage, while allowing fast seeking in
large cached network streams (especially live streams). Keeping the
packet metadata on disk would be rather hard (would use mmap or so, or
rewrite the entire demux.c packet queue handling), and since it's
relatively small, just keep it in memory.
Also for simplicity, the disk cache is append-only. If you're watching
really long livestreams, and need pruning, you're probably out of luck.
This still could be improved by trying to free unused blocks with
fallocate(), but since we're writing multiple streams in an interleaved
manner, this is slightly hard.
Some rather gross ugliness in packet.h: we want to store the file
position of the cached data somewhere, but on 32 bit architectures, we
don't have any usable 64 bit members for this, just the buf/len fields,
which add up to 64 bit - so the shitty union aliases this memory.
Error paths untested. Side data (the complicated part of trying to
serialize ffmpeg packets) untested.
Stream recording had to be adjusted. Some minor details change due to
this, but probably nothing important.
The change in attempt_range_joining() is because packets in cache
have no valid len field. It was a useful check (heuristically
finding broken cases), but not a necessary one.
Various other approaches were tried. It would be interesting to list
them and to mention the pros and cons, but I don't feel like it.
The old implementation didn't work for the OGG case. Discard the old
shit code (instead of fixing it), and write new shit code. The old code
was already over a year old, so it's about time to rewrite it for no
reason anyway.
While it's true that the old code appears to be broken, the main reason
to rewrite this is to make it simpler. While the amount of code seems to
be about the same, both the concept and the actual tag handling are
simpler. The result is probably a bit more correct.
The packet struct shrinks by 8 byte. That fact that it wasted 8 bytes
per packet for a rather obscure use case was the reason I started this
at all (and when I found that OGG updates didn't work). While these 8
bytes aren't going to hurt, the packet struct was getting too bloated.
If you buffer a lot of data, these extra fields will add up. Still quite
some effort for 8 bytes. Fortunately, it's not like there are any
managers that need to be convinced whether it's worth doing. The freedom
to waste time on dumb shit.
The old implementation attached the current metadata to each packet.
When the decoder read the packet, the packet's metadata was made
current. The new implementation stores metadata as separate list, and
requires that the player frontend tells it the current playback time,
which will be used to find the currently valid metadata. In both cases,
the objective was to correctly update metadata even if a lot of data is
buffered ahead (and to update them correctly when seeking within the
demuxer cache).
The new implementation is actually slightly more correct, because it
uses the playback time for the metadata lookup. Consider if you have an
audio filter which buffers 15 seconds (unfortunately such a filter
exists), then the old code would update the current title 15 seconds too
early, while the new one does it correctly.
The new code also simplifies mixing the 3 metadata sources (global, per
stream, ICY). We assume these aren't mixed in a meaningful way. The old
code tried to be a bit more "exact". I didn't bother to look how the old
code did this, but the new code simply always "merges" with the previous
metadata, so if a newer tag removes a field, it's going to stick around
anyway.
I tried to keep it simple. Other approaches include making metadata a
special sh_stream with metadata packets. This would have been
conceptually clean, but the implementation would probably have been
unnatural (and doesn't match well with libavformat's API anyway). It
would have been nice to make the metadata updates chapter points (makes
a lot of sense for the intended use case, web radio current song
information), but I don't think it would have been a good idea to make
chapters suddenly so dynamic. (Still an idea to keep in mind; the new
code actually makes it easier to work towards this.)
You could mention how subtitles are timed metadata, and actually are
implemented as sparse packet streams in some formats. mp4 implements
chapters as special subtitle stream, AFAIK. (Ironically, this is very
not-ideal for files. It would be useful for streaming like web radio,
but mp4 is extremely bad for streaming by design for other reasons.)
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla
Remove the duplicated creation of the first range. Explicitly destroy
ranges, including the last one on final deinit.
It looks like this also fixes a leak of removed range structs, which was
never noticed because they're so small, and were freed on final deinit
due to having the demuxer as talloc parent.
This improves upon the previous commit too (that change should have
been part of it I guess). Sub-demuxers (demux_timeline only) now
automatically don't use the cache (like it was intended by the previous
commit). The cache is "initialized" (or disabled) last in the recursive
call chain, which is messy, but this sub demuxer stuff FUCKING SUCKS, as
mentioned in the previous commit message. This would be no problem if
the caching layer and actual demuxer implementations were separate.
Most of this change has no purpose. Might make (de-)initialization of
further cache exerpiments simpler.
It seems the so called demuxer cache wasn't really disabled for
sub-demuxers (timeline stuff). This was relatively harmless, since the
actual packet data was shared anyway via refcounting. But with the
addition of a mmap cache backend, this may change a lot.
So strictly disable any caching for sub-demuxers. This assumes that
users of sub-demuxers (only demux_timeline.c by now?) strictly use
demux_read_any_packet(), since demux_read_packet_async() will require
some minor read-ahead if a low level packet read returned a packet for a
different stream.
This requires some awkward messing with this fucking heap of trash. The
thing that is really wrong here is that the demuxer API mixes different
concepts, and sub-demuxers get the same API as decoders, and use the
cache code.
See manpage additions. This is a huge hack. You can bet there are shit
tons of bugs. It's literally forcing square pegs into round holes.
Hopefully, the manpage wall of text makes it clear enough that the whole
shit can easily crash and burn. (Although it shouldn't literally crash.
That would be a bug. It possibly _could_ start a fire by entering some
sort of endless loop, not a literal one, just something where it tries
to do work without making progress.)
(Some obvious bugs I simply ignored for this initial version, but
there's a number of potential bugs I can't even imagine. Normal playback
should remain completely unaffected, though.)
How this works is also described in the manpage. Basically, we demux in
reverse, then we decode in reverse, then we render in reverse.
The decoding part is the simplest: just reorder the decoder output. This
weirdly integrates with the timeline/ordered chapter code, which also
has special requirements on feeding the packets to the decoder in a
non-straightforward way (it doesn't conflict, although a bugmessmass
breaks correct slicing of segments, so EDL/ordered chapter playback is
broken in backward direction).
Backward demuxing is pretty involved. In theory, it could be much
easier: simply iterating the usual demuxer output backward. But this
just doesn't fit into our code, so there's a cthulhu nightmare of shit.
To be specific, each stream (audio, video) is reversed separately. At
least this means we can do backward playback within cached content (for
example, you could play backwards in a live stream; on that note, it
disables prefetching, which would lead to losing new live video, but
this could be avoided).
The fuckmess also meant that I didn't bother trying to support
subtitles. Subtitles are a problem because they're "sparse" streams.
They need to be "passively" demuxed: you don't try to read a subtitle
packet, you demux audio and video, and then look whether there was a
subtitle packet. This means to get subtitles for a time range, you need
to know that you demuxed video and audio over this range, which becomes
pretty messy when you demux audio and video backwards separately.
Backward display is the most weird (and potentially buggy) part. To
avoid that we need to touch a LOT of timing code, we negate all
timestamps. The basic idea is that due to the navigation, all
comparisons and subtractions of timestamps keep working, and you don't
need to touch every single of them to "reverse" them.
E.g.:
bool before = pts_a < pts_b;
would need to be:
bool before = forward
? pts_a < pts_b
: pts_a > pts_b;
or:
bool before = pts_a * dir < pts_b * dir;
or if you, as it's implemented now, just do this after decoding:
pts_a *= dir;
pts_b *= dir;
and then in the normal timing/renderer code:
bool before = pts_a < pts_b;
Consequently, we don't need many changes in the latter code. But some
assumptions inhererently true for forward playback may have been broken
anyway. What is mainly needed is fixing places where values are passed
between positive and negative "domains". For example, seeking and
timestamp user display always uses positive timestamps. The main mess is
that it's not obvious which domain a given variable should or does use.
Well, in my tests with a single file, it suddenly started to work when I
did this. I'm honestly surprised that it did, and that I didn't have to
change a single line in the timing code past decoder (just something
minor to make external/cached text subtitles display). I committed it
immediately while avoiding thinking about it. But there really likely
are subtle problems of all sorts.
As far as I'm aware, gstreamer also supports backward playback. When I
looked at this years ago, I couldn't find a way to actually try this,
and I didn't revisit it now. Back then I also read talk slides from the
person who implemented it, and I'm not sure if and which ideas I might
have taken from it. It's possible that the timestamp reversal is
inspired by it, but I didn't check. (I think it claimed that it could
avoid large changes by changing a sign?)
VapourSynth has some sort of reverse function, which provides a backward
view on a video. The function itself is trivial to implement, as
VapourSynth aims to provide random access to video by frame numbers (so
you just request decreasing frame numbers). From what I remember, it
wasn't exactly fluid, but it worked. It's implemented by creating an
index, and seeking to the target on demand, and a bunch of caching. mpv
could use it, but it would either require using VapourSynth as demuxer
and decoder for everything, or replacing the current file every time
something is supposed to be played backwards.
FFmpeg's libavfilter has reversal filters for audio and video. These
require buffering the entire media data of the file, and don't really
fit into mpv's architecture. It could be used by playing a libavfilter
graph that also demuxes, but that's like VapourSynth but worse.
There are 3 packet reading functions in the demux API, which all
function completely differently. One of them, demux_read_packet(), has
only 1 caller, which is in dec_sub.c. Change this caller to use
demux_read_packet_async() instead. Since it really wants to do a
blocking call, setup some proper waiting. This uses mp_dispatch_queue,
because even though it's overkill, it needs the least code.
In practice, waiting actually never happens. This code is only called on
code paths where everything is already read into memory (libavformat's
subtitle demuxers simply behave this way). It's still a bit of a
"coincidence", so implement it properly anyway.
If suubtitle decoder init fails, we still need to unset the demuxer
wakeup callback. Add a sub_destroy() call to the failure path. This also
happens to fix a missed pthread_mutex_destroy() call (in practice this
was a nop, or a memory leak on BSDs).
demux_timeline doesn't do any transport accesses itself. The slave
demuxers do this (these will actually access the stream layer and
perform e.g. network accesses). As a consequence, demux_timeline always
reported 0 bytes read, and network speed display didn't work.
Fix this by awkwardly reporting the amount of read bytes upwards. This
is not very nice, and requires explicit calls whenever the slave "might"
have read data.
Due to the way the reporting is done, it only works if the slaves do not
run demuxer threads, which makes things even less nice. (Fortunately
they don't anyway, because it would be a waste of resources.) Some
identifiers contain the word "hack" as a warning.
Some of the stupidity comes from the fact that demux.c itself resets the
stats randomly in order to calculate the bytes_per_second value, which
is useless for a slave, but of course is still done, because demux.c
itself is not aware of whether it's on the slave or top-level layer.
Unfortunately, this must do.
In theory, the demuxer thread/cache layer should be separated from
demuxer implementations. This would get rid of all the awkwardness and
nonsense. For example, the only threading involved would be the caching
layer, completely separate from demuxers themselves. It'd be the only
thing calculates speed rates for the player frontend, too (instead of
doing it for each demuxer, even if unused).
It was an ugly hack, and the next commit will make it even uglier.
Slightly reduce the ugliness to prevent death of too many brain cells,
though it's still an ugly hack.
The cleanup is really minor, but I guess the following commit would be
much worse otherwise. In particular, this commit checks accesses
(instead of having a public field with evil access rules), which should
avoid misunderstandings and incorrect use. Strictly speaking, the added
field is redundant, but the next commit complicates it a bit.
The only thing left is the notification for track switching. Just get
rid of that.
There's probably no real reason to get rid of control(), but why not. I
think I was actually trying to do some real work but fuck that.
Subtitles (and a few other file types, like playlists) are not streamed,
but fully read on opening. This means keeping the file handle or network
socket open is a waste of resources and could cause other weird
behavior. This is why there's a hack to close them after opening.
Change this hack to make the demuxer itself do this, which is less
weird. (Until recently, demuxer->stream ownership was more complex,
which is why it was done this way.)
There is some evil shit due to a huge ownership/lifetime mess of various
objects. Especially EDL (the currently only nested demuxer case)
requires being careful about mp_cancel and passing down stream pointers.
As one defensive programming measure, stop accessing the "stream"
variable in open_given_type(), even where it would still work. This
includes removing a redundant line of code, and removing the peak call,
which should not be needed anymore, as the remaining demuxers do this
mostly correctly.
I always wanted to get rid of this, because it makes the ownership rules
for the stream pointer really awkward. demux_edl.c was the only
remaining user of this. Replace it with a semi-clever idea: the init
segment shit can be used to pass the "file" contents as memory block,
and "memory://" itself provides an empty stream. I have no idea if this
actually works, because I didn't immediately find a test stream (would
have to be some youtube DASH shit).
Instead of going through those weird DEMUXER_CTRLs, query this
information directly. I'm not sure which kind of brain damage made me
use CTRLs for these. Since there are no other DEMUXER_CTRLs that make
sense for the frontend, remove the remaining infrastructure for them
too.
The stream size return was the only thing that still required doing
STREAM_CTRLs from frontend through the demuxer layer. This can be done
much easier, so rip it out. Also rip out the now unused infrastructure
for STREAM_CTRLs via demuxer layer.
The "program" property could switch between TS programs. It was rather
complex and rather obscure (even if you deal with TS captures, you
usually don't need it). If anyone actually needs it (did anyone ever
attempt to even use it?), it should be rewritten. The demuxer should
export a program list, and the frontend should handle the "cycling"
logic.
Linux analog TV support (via tv://) was excessively complex, and
whenever I attempted to use it (cameras or loopback devices), it didn't
work well, or would have required some major work to update it. It's
very much stuck in the analog past (my favorite are the frequency tables
in frequencies.c for analog TV channels which don't exist anymore).
Especially cameras and such work fine with libavdevice and better than
tv://, for example:
mpv av://v4l2:/dev/video0
(adding --profile=low-latency --untimed even makes it mostly realtime)
Adding a new input layer that targets such "modern" uses would be
acceptable, if anyone is interested in it. The old TV code is just too
focused on actual analog TV.
DVB is rather obscure, but has an active maintainer, so don't remove it.
However, the demux/stream ctrl layer must go, so remove controls for
channel switching. Most of these could be reimplemented by using the
normal method for option runtime changes.
This removes anything related to DVD/BD/CD that negatively affected the
core code. It includes trying to rewrite timestamps (since DVDs and
Blurays do not set packet stream timestamps to playback time, and can
even have resets mid-stream), export of chapters, stream languages,
export of title/track lists, and all that.
Only basic seeking is supported. It is very much possible that seeking
completely fails on some discs (on some parts of the timeline), because
timestamp rewriting was removed.
Note that I don't give a shit about optical media. If you want to watch
them, rip them. Keeping some bare support for DVD/BD is the most I'm
going to do to appease the type of lazy, obnoxious users who will care.
There are other players which are better at optical discs.
--record-file is nice, but only sometimes. If you watch some sort of
livestream which you want to record, it's actually much nicer not to
record what you're currently "seeing", but anything you're receiving.
The demuxer cache is the only cache now. Might need another change to
combat seeking failures in mp4 etc. The only bad thing is the loss of
cache-speed, which was sort of nice to have.
This will enable the player core to terminate the demuxers in a "nicer"
way without having to block on network. If it just used demux_free(), it
would either have to block on network, or like currently, essentially
kill all I/O forcefully.
The API is slightly awkward, because demuxer lifetime is bound to its
allocation. On the other hand, changing that would also be awkward, and
introduce weird in-between states that would have to be handled in tons
of places.
Currently unused, to be user later.
Alway give each demuxer its own mp_cancel instance. This makes
management of the mp_cancel things much easier. Also, instead of having
add/remove functions for mp_cancel slaves, replace them with a simpler
to use set_parent function. Remove cancel_and_free_demuxer(), which had
mpctx as parameter only to check an assumption. With this commit,
demuxers have their own mp_cancel, so add demux_cancel_and_free() which
makes use of it.
Them being separate is just dumb. Replace them with a single
demux_free() function, and free its stream by default. Not freeing the
stream is only needed in 1 special case (demux_disc.c), use a special
flag to not free the stream in this case.
The properties/commands touched in this commit are all for obscure
special inputs (BD/DVD/DVB/TV), and they all block on the demuxer/stream
layer. For network streams, this blocking is very unwelcome. They will
affect playback and probably introduce pauses and frame drops. The
player can even freeze fully, and the logic that tries to make playback
abortable even if frozen complicates the player.
Since the mentioned accesses are not needed for network streams, but
they will block on network streams even though they're going to fail,
add a flag that coarsely enables/disables these accesses. Essentially it
establishes a whitelist of demuxers/streams which support them.
In theory you could to access BD/DVD images over network (or add such
support, I don't think it's a thing in mpv). In these cases these
controls still can block and could even "freeze" the player completely.
Writing to the "program" and "cache-size" properties still can block
even for network streams. Just don't use them if you don't want freezes.
This makes ICY title changes show up at approximately the correct time,
even if the demuxer buffer is huge. (It'll still be wrong if the stream
byte cache contains a meaningful amount of data.)
It should have the same effect for mid-stream metadata changes in e.g.
OGG (untested).
This is still somewhat fishy, but in parts due to ICY being fishy, and
FFmpeg's metadata change API being somewhat fishy. For example, what
happens if you seek? With FFmpeg AVFMT_EVENT_FLAG_METADATA_UPDATED and
AVSTREAM_EVENT_FLAG_METADATA_UPDATED we hope that FFmpeg will correctly
restore the correct metadata when the first packet is returned.
If you seke with ICY, we're out of luck, and some audio will be
associated with the wrong tag until we get a new title through ICY
metadata update at an essentially random point (it's mostly inherent to
ICY). Then the tags will switch back and forth, and this behavior will
stick with the data stored in the demuxer cache. Fortunately, this can
happen only if the HTTP stream is actually seekable, which it usually is
not for ICY things. Seeking doesn't even make sense with ICY, since you
can't know the exact metadata location. Basically ICY metsdata sucks.
Some complexity is due to a microoptimization: I didn't want additional
atomic accesses for each packet if no timed metadata is used. (It
probably doesn't matter at all.)
This is supposed to help making data flow easier and wakeup handling
more efficient. Once that change is done, reading a packet on any
stream won't have to wakeup and poll all decoders (which helps reducing
the mess even if all decoders are on the same thread).
This also improves the accuracy of wakeups by tracking better whether
a wakeup is needed.
If you play a video with an external audio track, and do backwards
keyframe seeks, then audio can be missing. This is because a backwards
seek can end up way before the seek target (this is just how this seek
mode works). The audio file will be seeked at the correct seek target
(since audio usually has a much higher seek granularity), which results
in silence being played until the video reaches the originally intended
seek target.
There was a hack in audio.c to deal with this. Replace it with a
different hack. The new hack probably works about as well as the old
hack, except it doesn't add weird crap to the audio resync path (which
is some of the worst code here, so this is some nice preparation for
rewriting it). As a more practical advantage, it doesn't discard the
audio demuxer packet cache. The old code did, which probably ruined
seeking in youtube DASH streams.
A non-hacky solution would be handling external files in the demuxer
layer. Then chaining the seeks would be pretty easy. But we're pretty
far from that, because it would either require intrusive changes to the
demuxer layer, or wouldn't be flexible enough to load/unload external
files at runtime. Maybe later.
Export them as explicitly undocumented debugging fields for the
"demuxer-cache-state" property.
Should be somewhat helpful to debug "wtf is the demuxer" doing
situations better, especially when seeking. It also becomes visible how
long the demuxer is blocked on an "old" seek when you keep seeking while
the first seek hasn't finished.
This will help with things like livestreams.
As a minor detail, subtitles are excluded, because they sometimes have
"unused" events after video and audio ends. To avoid this annoying
corner case, just ignore them.
Before this change and before the seekable stream cache became a thing,
we could possibly seek using the stream cache. But we couldn't know
whether the seek would succeed. We knew the available byte range, but
could in general not tell whether a demuxer would stay within the range
when trying to seek to a specific time position. We preferred to have
safe defaults, so seeking in streams that were detected as unseekable
were not honored. We allowed overriding this via --force-seekable=yes,
in which case it depended on your luck whether the seek would work, or
the player crapped its pants.
With the demuxer packet cache, we can tell exactly whether a seek will
work (at least if there's only 1 seek range). We can just let seeks go
through. Everything to allow this is already in place, and this commit
just moves around some minor things.
Note that the demux_seek() return value was not used before, because low
level (i.e. network level) seeks are usually asynchronous, and if they
fail, the state is pretty much undefined. We simply repurpose the return
value to signal whether cache seeking worked. If it didn't, we can just
resume playback normally, because demuxing continues unaffected, and no
decoder are reset.
This should be particularly helpful to people who for some reason stream
data into stdin via streamlink and such.
It seems like there's nothing stopping from sub-demuxers from keeping
packets in the cache, even if it's completely pointless. The top-most
demuxer (demux_timeline) already takes care of caching, so sub-demuxers
only waste space and time with this.
Add a function that can disable the packet cache even at runtime and
after packets are read. (It's not clear whether it really can happen
that packets are read before demux_timeline gets the sub-demuxers, but
there's no reason to make it too fragile.) Call it on all sub-demuxers.
For this to work, it seems we have to move the code for setting the
seekable_cache flag to before demux_timeline is potentially initialized,
because otherwise the cache would be reenabled if the demuxer triggering
timeline support is a timeline segment itself (e.g. ordered chapters).
Until now, the demuxer cache was limited to a single range. Extend this
to multiple range. Should be useful for slow network streams.
This commit changes a lot in the internal demuxer cache logic, so
there's a lot of room for bugs and regressions. The logic without
demuxer cache is mostly untouched, but also involved with the code
changes. Or in other words, this commit probably fucks up shit.
There are two things which makes multiple cached ranges rather hard:
1. the need to resume the demuxer at the end of a cached range when
seeking to it
2. joining two adjacent ranges when the lowe range "grows" into it (and
resuming the demuxer at the end of the new joined range)
"Resuming" the demuxer means that we perform a low level seek to the end
of a cached range, and properly append new packets to it, without adding
packets multiple times or creating holes due to missing packets.
Since audio and video never line up exactly, there is no clean "cut"
possible, at which you could resume the demuxer cleanly (for 1.) or
which you could use to detect that two ranges are perfectly adjacent
(for 2.). The way how the demuxer interleaves multiple streams is also
unpredictable. Typically you will have to expect that it randomly allows
one of the streams to be ahead by a bit, and so on.
To deal with this, we have heuristics in place to detect when one packet
equals or is "behind" a packet that was demuxed earlier. We reuse the
refresh seek logic (used to "reread" packets into the demuxer cache when
enabling a track), which checks for certain packet invariants.
Currently, it observes whether either the raw packet position, or the
packet DTS is strictly monotonically increasing. If none of them are
true, we discard old ranges when creating a new one.
This heavily depends on the file format and the demuxer behavior. For
example, not all file formats have DTS, and the packet position can be
unset due to libavformat not always setting it (e.g. when parsers are
used).
At the same time, we must deal with all the complicated state used to
track prefetching and seek ranges. In some complicated corner cases, we
just give up and discard other seek ranges, even if the previously
mentioned packet invariants are fulfilled.
To handle joining, we're being particularly dumb, and require a small
overlap to be confident that two ranges join perfectly. (This could be
done incrementally with as little overlap as 1 packet, but corner cases
would eat us: each stream needs to be joined separately, and the cache
pruning logic could remove overlapping packets for other streams again.)
Another restriction is that switching the cached range will always
trigger an asynchronous low level seek to resume demuxing at the new
range. Some users might find this annoying.
Dealing with interleaved subtitles is not fully handled yet. It will
clamp the seekable range to where subtitle packets are.
Even though only 1 seek range is supported at the time.
Other than preparation for possibly future features, the main gain is
actually that we finally separate the reporting for the buffering, and
the seek ranges. These can be subtly different, so it's good to have a
clear separation.
This commit also fixes that the ts_reader wasn't rebased to the start
time, which could make the player show "???" for buffered cache amount
in some .ts files and others (especially at the end, when ts_reader
could become higher than ts_max). It also fixes writing the cache-end
field in the demuxer-cache-state property: it checked ts_start against
NOPTS, which makes no sense.
ts_start was never used (except for the bug mentioned above), so get rid
of it completely. This also makes it convenient to move the segment
check for last_ts to the demux_add_packet() function.
Seems like most code dealing with this was for setting it in redundant
cases. Now SEEK_BACKWARD is redundant, and SEEK_FORWARD is the odd one
out.
Also fix that SEEK_FORWARD was not correctly unset in try_seek_cache().
In demux_mkv_seek(), make the arbitrary decision that a video stream is
not required for the subtitle prefetch logic to be active. We might want
subtitles with long duration even with audio only playback, or if the
file is used as external subtitle.
wm4