Until now, this usually passed a single audio frame to the decoder, and
then did a backstep operation (cache seek + frame search) again. This is
probably not very efficient, especially considering it has to search the
packet queue from the "start" every time again.
Also, with most audio codecs, an additional "preroll" frame was passed
first. In these cases, the preroll frame would make up 50% of audio
decoding time. Also not very efficient.
Attempt to fix this by returning multiple frames at once. This reduces
the number of backstep operations and the ratio the preoll frames. In
theory, this should help efficiency. I didn't test it though, why would
I do this? It's just a pain. Set it to unscientific 10 frames.
(Actually, these are 10 keyframes, so it's much more for codecs like
TrueHD. But I don't care about TrueHD.)
This commit changes some other implementation details. Since we can
return more than 1 non-preroll keyframe to the decoder, some new state
is needed to remember how much. The resume packet search is adjusted to
find N ("total") keyframe packets in general, not just preroll frames.
I'm removing the special case for 1 preroll packet; audio used this, but
doesn't anymore, and it's premature optimization anyway.
Expose the new mechanism with 2 new options. They're almost completely
pointless, since nobody will try them, and if they do, they won't
understand what these options truly do. And if they actually do, they
most likely would be capable of editing the source code, and we could
just hardcode the parameters. Just so you know that I know that the
added options are pointless.
The following two things are truly unrelated to this commit, and more
like general refactoring, but fortunately nobody can stop me.
Don't set back_seek_pos in dequeue_packet() anymore. This was sort of
pointless, since it was set in find_backward_restart_pos() anyway (using
some of the same packets). The latter function tries to restrict this to
the first keyframe range though, which is an optimization that in theory
might break with broken files (duh), but in these cases a lot of other
things would be broken anyway.
Don't set back_restart_* in dequeue_packet(). I think this is an
artifact of the old restart code (cf. ad9e473c55). It can be done
directly in find_backward_restart_pos() now. Although this adds another
shitty packet search loop, I prefer this, because clearer what's
actually happening.
The size of all forward buffered packets is used to control maximum
buffering.
Until now, this size was incrementally adjusted, but had to be
recomputed on seeks within the cache. Doing this was actually pretty
expensive. It iterates over a linked list of separate memory allocations
(which are probably spread all over the heap due to the allocation
behavior), and the demux_packet_estimate_total_size() call touches a lot
of further memory locations. I guess this affects the cache rather
negatively. In an unscientific test, the recompute_buffers() function
(which contained this loop) was responsible for roughly half of the time
seeking took.
Replace this with a way that computes the buffered size between 2
packets in constant times. The demux_packet.cum_pos field contains the
summed sizes of all previous packets, so subtracting cum_pos between two
packets yields the size of all packets in between. We can do this
because we never remove packets from the middle of the queue. We only
add packets to the end, or remove packets at the beginning.
The tail_cum_pos field is needed because we don't store the end position
of a packet, so the last packet's position would be unknown. We could
recompute the "estimated" packet size, or store the estimated size in
the packet struct, but I just didn't like this.
This also removes the cached fw_bytes fields. It's slightly nicer to
just recompute them when needed. Maintaining them incrementally was
annoying. total_size stays though, since recomputing it isn't that cheap
(would need to loop over all ranges every time).
I'm always using uint64_t for sizes. This is certainly needed (a stream
could easily burn through more than 4GB of data, even if much less of
that is cached). The actual cached amount should always fit into size_t,
so it's casted to size_t for printfs (yes, I hate the way you specify
stdint.h types in printfs, the less I have to use that crap, the
better).
In ancient times, the number of packets was used to limit excessive
read-ahead. This was completely replaced by tracking the size in bytes.
The number of packets was used in debugging output only.
In one case (packet got demuxed and is added to a queue), only log
whether there were packets on this stream before. (Unknown whether it's
useful.)
In another case (queue overflow), actually count the number of packets.
It's vaguely useful, and the message with the number of packets is shown
only once after a seek reset, so it doesn't matter whether it's slow.
Some state wasn't reset when decoding was started without a seek reset
before it. The code used to rely on reset_decoder() resetting this
state, but since the commit referenced below, reset_decoder() does less
than reset().
Fix this by explicitly calling reset() on initialization.
Fixes: "f_decoder_wrapper: avoid full reset on timeline switch etc."
Some files don't start with keyframe packets. Normally, this is not
sane, but the sample file which triggered this was a cut TV capture
transport stream. And this shouldn't happen anyway.
Introduce a further heuristic: if the last seek target was before the
start of the cached data, and the start of the cache is marked as BOF
(beginning of file), then we won't find anything better. This is
possibly a bit shaky, because both seek_start and back_seek_pos weren't
made for this purpose. But I can't come up with situations where this
would actually break. (Leave this to shitty broken files I hit later.)
I also considered finding the first packet in the cache that is marked
as keyframe, i.e. the first actual seek target, and comparing it to
"first", but I didn't like it much. Well whatever.
It's a bit silly that this caused a hard freeze (and similar issues
still will). The problem is that the demuxer holds the lock and has no
reason to release it. And in general, there's a single lock for the
entire demuxer cache. Finer grained locking would probably not make much
sense. In theory status of available data and maybe certain commands to
the demuxer could be moved to separate locks, but it would raise
complexity, and you'd probably still need to get the central lock in
some cases, which would deadlock you anyway.
It would still be nice if some minor corner case in the wonderfully
terrible and complex backward demuxer state machine couldn't lock up the
player. As a hack, unlock and then immediately lock again. Depending on
the OS mutex implementation, this may give other waiters a chance to
grab the lock. This is not a guarantee (some OSes may for example not
wake up other waiters until the next time slice or something), but works
well on Linux.
The step_backwards function set reader_head to the start of the current
cache range. This was completely unnecessary and made it _much_ slower.
Remove the code that adjusts reader_head. Merge the rest of the code
into the only caller and remove the function.
The comment on the removed code was quite right. It was "inefficient".
Removing it delegates going to an early position to the normal seek
code, triggered by find_backward_restart_pos() incremental back seek
logic. I suppose especially audio benefits from this, because this
happens for every single audio packet (except maybe freaky bullshit like
TrueHD, which has "keyframes").
The blabla about performance in the removed comments is still true, but
now applies to the seek code itself only.
Fixes "mpv file.mkv --cache --demuxer-cache-wait --play-dir=backward",
and other situations where the demuxer cache contains the entire file,
and playback is to start from the end. It also can be triggered when
starting playback normally with --cache, and once everything is in the
cache, enabling backward playback and seeking past EOF.
In all cases, the cache seek will set reader_head=NULL (because you
seeked to/past EOF). Then the code (the one modified by this commit)
sees that ds->queue->is_bof==true, and thinks we've reached BOF
(beginning of file) while searching for a useful packet, i.e. we found
nothing and playback really can only end.
Obviously this is nonsense, we've found only nothing if we actually
searched from the beginning, not some "random" reader_head (== first)
value that does not include the entire cache. That means the condition
should trigger only if the start of the search (first variable) points
to the beginning of the cache (ds->queue->head).
Not taking this if means we'll seek to an earlier position and retry.
Also, a seek before the beginning of the cache will always end up with
reader_head==ds->queue->head, i.e. we'll terminate properly.
That comment was quite right.
Before this commit, there was a single process_decoded_frame() function.
It handled various aspects of dealing with a newly decoded frame. Move
some of these to a separate process_output_frame() function.
This new function is called in the order the frames are returned to the
playback core. Some correct_audio_pts() (was process_audio_frame())
becomes slightly less awkward due to this, and the timestamp smoothing
can actually work in backward playback mode now (thus moving p->pts out
of reset_decoder()).
Behavior for normal playback also changes subtly. This shouldn't matter
in sane cases, but if you mix broken files, --no-correct-pts, and
timeline stuff, differences in behavior might be visible.
Timeline clipping (EDL/ordered chapters) works now, because it's done
before "transforming" the timestamps. Audio timestamp smoothing happens
after it, which is a behavior change, but should be more correct. This
still runs crazy_video_pts_stuff() before everything else. On the pther
hand, --no-correct-pts or missing timestamp processing is done last. But
these things didn't really work with timeline before.
Slightly cleaner. We don't need to awkwardly backup "some" state on
backwards playback. Due to not resetting last_format, normal timeline
switches don't unconditionally trigger recomputing of certain image
parameters. Also probably doesn't reset framedrop parameters, although I
don't care about that part.
This could lead to nonsense when backward playback is involved. Better
reduce the possible interactions. Besides, it's better to fully reset
things on seeks in general.
The only exception is has_broken_packet_pts, which enables hr-seek if
everything looks good. It's intended to trigger at the second hr-seek or
so if the file is normal, and to disable it if the file is broken. It
tries to avoid enabling the hr-seek logic before it can know about
whether things are "good", so resetting it on seeks would obviously
never enable it. Document it as explicit exception.
And add simpler aliases for the modes.
I'm not sure how to name things, and the option list is in general full
of different conventions. Some names are shortened, some are explicit
and long.
I guess options that have a chance to be used normally (i.e. not obscure
tuning or debugging) should have a short and convenient names.
In this specific case, play-direction is like a mixture of both. It
should be either playback-direction or play-dir, not shorten one word
but not the other.
The convenience aliases are because I got sick of typing out "backward".
I guess "back" would also do it, but there's no proper antonym (and
maybe it's "wrong" in the strict sense of the word).
Together with the previous commit, this seems to make backward playback
work in files with vorbis and mp3 audio codecs.
For Vorbis (with libavcodec's decoder, didn't test libvorbis), the first
packet was just always completely discarded. This happened even though
we tell libavcodec that we do discarding of padding manually. It simply
happened inside the codec, not libavcodec's general initial padding
handling. In addition, the first output decoded frame seems to contain
partial data. (Unlike the opus decoder, it doesn't report any padding at
all.)
The Opus decoder (again libavcodec only tested) reports an initial
padding, but it appears to be too small, and it sounds right only with 2
packets discarded. So its status doesn't change.
I'm not sure why I need 2 frames for mp3, but with that value I had
success on the samples I tested.
Some audio codecs will discard or cut the first frames when starting
decoding. While some of that works through well-defined mechanisms (like
initial padding), it's in general very codec/decoder specific, and not
really predictable. In addition, libavcodec isn't very good with
reporting "dropped" frames (and our internal interface reflects this).
It seems our only chance to handle this is through timestamps.
In theory, it would be best to discard frames that have timestamps
before the "resume" position. But since video has reordered timestamps,
we'd need to put some effort into finding this position. The first video
packet doesn't necessarily contain this timestamp. (In theory, we could
just do this in the demuxer with some trivial additional work, and set
it on the packet's kf_seek_pts field. Although this field is supposed to
contain just this value, the field is considered demuxer-internal, and I
didn't want to make matters worse by reusing it for the interface to the
decoder. With some more effort and buffering, we could calculate this
value within the decoder, but fuck that.)
The approach chosen in this commit is setting the timestamp to NOPTS.
This will break in some obscure situations, but backward playback is a
pretty obscure feature to begin with, so I considered this a reasonable
implementation choice.
Before passing a preroll packet to the decoder, its timestamps are set
to NOPTS. Frames that are returned from the decoder and have the NOPTS
timestamp are considered preroll and are discarded. This happens only
during "preroll" mode (preroll_discard==true), so it doesn't affect
normal forward playback. It's disabled on the first packet with a
timestamp, so it can tolerate some crap even in backward playback mode.
We don't check the dts fields out of laziness (decoded audio frames
don't even have this field).
I considered using an approach using the EDL clipping infrastructure (as
mentioned in the last two paragraphs in the commit message of commit
" demux_lavf: implement bad hack for backward playback of wav"). This
didn't work, and I blamed timestamp rounding within mpv for it. But the
problem was actually due to Matroska-rounded timestamps. Since the audio
frame size isn't exactly aligned to 1ms, there will be an overlap (or
gap) in the timestamps. This overlap is much smaller than 1ms, since
it's just the sub-millisecond remainder part of the audio frame size.
This makes the timestamps discontinuous and unreliable for the purpose
we wanted to use it. We can't just smooth the timestamps in the demuxer
either.
Matroska has this weird concept of "lacing", which are really sub-blocks
packed into a larger actual block. They are demuxed as individual
packets, because that's what the decoder needs. Basically they're a
Matroska hack to reduce per-packet muxing overhead.
One problem is that these sub-blocks don't have timestamps. The
timestamps need to be created from the "default duration". If this
default duration isn't in the file header (or if we drop it when it has
a known broken value), the resulting packets won't have a timestamp.
This is an usual and weird situation, that may confuse the demuxer layer
(and backward playback in particular). Fix this by not setting the
keyframe flag for these.
This affects only audio packets. Subtitle lacing is explicitly not
supported (in theory would at least lack a way to specify durations),
and video won't usually use it for real video codecs (not every frame is
a "keyframe", timestamp reordering).
Clarify existing semantics for the --start/--end/--length options.
De-emphasize the difference between absolute and relative timestamps,
since they've not been different by default since mpv 0.14.
Document a bug, that also happens to work as a feature: if the option
value begins with spaces, the code for checking for relative timestamps
is inactive, and they're always considered absolute. The check is done
on the first character of the string - so even a negative timestamp will
be treated as absolute.)
Yes, this is useful in extremely rare situations, such as when you
really want send a specific timestamp (even a negative one) to the
demuxer.
Another shitty obscure feature that usually nobody notices.
Unsurprisingly, it doesn't go well with backward playback mode.
If you use --keep-open in forward playback mode, and seek past the end
of the file, it tries to seek to the very last frame. The demuxer will
seek to the last "keyframe" before the end (i.e. some frames to go in
most cases), and trying to hr-seek to the file duration often won't cut
it, so this requires some special code. The function at hand seeks
"close" to the end, and then stops hr-seek when the last frame us
encountered (simple enough and very effective).
In backward playback mode, start and end are reversed, and we need to
seek "close" to the start of the file instead. Simple enough to do, and
it works.
One problem is that command.c has some weird logic to make going beyond
the last chapter either end playback (--keep-open=no), or jump to the
last frame. Now this will jump to the first frame, which is weird, but
let's ignore this.
Another problem is that seeking before playback start position hits EOF
in backward playback mode, which is a demuxer bug, and has nothing to do
with this code. But it triggers this code, so seeking before the start
will show the "last" frame. (My description is a mess with directions.
Figure it out yourself.)
Obviously should seek back to the end of the file when it loops.
Also remove some minor code duplication around start times. This isn't
the correct solution by the way. Rather than hoping we know a reasonable
start/end time, this stuff should instruct the demuxer to seek to the
exact location. It'll work with 99% of all normal files, but add an
appropriate comment (that basically says the function is bullshit) to
get_start_time() anyway.
This changes the behavior of the --ab-loop-a/b options. In addition, it
makes it work with backward playback mode.
The most obvious change is that the both the A and B point need to be
set now before any looping happens. Unlike before, unset points don't
implicitly use the start or end of the file. I think the old behavior
was a feature that was explicitly added/wanted. Well, it's gone now.
This is because of 2 reasons:
1. I never liked this feature, and it always got in my way (as user).
2. It's inherently annoying with backward playback mode.
In backward playback mode, the user wants to set A/B in the wrong order.
The ab-loop command will first set A, then B, so if you use this command
during backward playback, A will be set to a higher timestamps than B.
If you switch back to forward playback mode, the loop would stop
working. I want the loop to just continue to work, and the chosen
solution conflicts with the removed feature.
The order issue above _could_ be fixed by also switching the AB-loop
user option values around on direction switch. But there are no other
instances of option changes magically affecting other options, and doing
this would probably lead to unexpected misery (dying from corner cases
and such).
Another solution is sorting the A/B points by timestamps after copying
them from the user options. Then A/B options set in backward mode will
work in forward mode. This is the chosen solution. If you sort the
points, you don't know anymore whether the unset point is supposed to
signify the end or the start of the file.
The AB-loop code is slightly better abstracted now, so it should be easy
to restore the removed feature. It would still require coming up with a
solution for backwards playback, though.
A minor change is that if one point is set and the other is unset, I'm
rendering both the chapter markers and the marker for the set point.
Why? I don't know. My test file had chapters, and I guess I decided this
looked better.
This commit also fixes some subtle and obvious issues that I already
forgot about when I wrote this commit message. It cleans up some minor
code duplication and nonsense too.
Regarding backward playback, the code uses an unsanitary mix of internal
("transformed") and user timestamps. So the play_dir variable appears
more than usual.
To mention one unfixed issue: if you set an AB-loop that is completely
past the end of the file, it will get stuck in an infinite seeking loop
once playback reaches the end of the file. Fixing this reliably seemed
annoying, so the fix is "just don't do this". It's not a hard freeze
anyway.
This code attempts to seek to the last frame by seeking close to the
end, and then decoding until the last frame has been reached. To do so
it sets hrseek_lastframe, which for video enables some logic to "catch"
this last frame, and completely ignores hrseek_pts. But audio still may
use hrseek_pts
I don't know if the original author (me) was thinking, if anything, when
setting this variable to 1e99, essentially a random, number. It's very
large, and a timestamp like this will never happen, so it does its job.
But it's random.
Use INFINITY instead. It will skip all audio samples in the audio code
correctly. This change doesn't fix anything, but it does get rid of the
random looking number.
The get_play_start_pts() function was supposed to return "rebased"
(relative to 0) timestamps. This was roundabout, because one of 2
callers just added the offset back, and the other caller actually
expected an absolute timestamp.
Change rel_time_to_abs() (whose return value get_play_start_pts()
returns without further changes) to return absolute times.
This should fix that absolute and relative times passed to --start and
--end were treated the same, which can't be right. It probably also
fixes --end if --rebase-start-time=no is used (which can't have been
correct either).
All in all I'm not sure why --rebase-start-time=no or absolute vs.
relative times in --start/--end even exist, when they were incorrectly
implemented for years.
Untested, because no sample file and I don't care. However, if anyone
cares, and I got it wrong, I hope it's simple to fix.
Has been deprecated for almost 3 years. Manpage didn't mention the
deprecation, but CLI and release notes did. It wouldn't be much effort
to keep this option working, but I just don't see the damn point.
--start/--end can specify chapters using special syntax, which is
equivalent.
We need to transform the timestamp returned by get_play_end_pts().
I considered making it return the transformed timestamp directly. There
are 4 callers; 2 need a transformed timestamps, 2 don't. So I guess it
doesn't matter.
This adds the stops using the same logic get_play_end_pts() and
handle_loop_file(). It did that before, it just looks slightly different
now. It also won't try to add MP_NOPTS_VALUE as stop value.
Shitty ancient hack that wastes my time all the time.
demux.c: always return the coverart packet as soon as possible, and
don't let the backward demux state machine possibly stop it.
f_decoder_wrapper.c: mess with some shit until it somehow starts to
work. I think the old code tried to let it cleverly fall through so the
packet was processed "normally"; just make it run the "usual" code
instead.
This commit generally fixes backward playing in wav, at least in most
PCM cases.
libavformat's wav demuxer (and actually all other raw PCM based
demuxers) have a specific behavior that breaks backward demuxing. The
same thing also breaks persistent seek ranges in the demuxer cache,
although that's less critical (it just means some cached data gets
discarded). The backward demuxing issue is fatal, will log the message
"Demuxer not cooperating.", and then typically stop doing anything.
Unlike modern media formats, these formats don't organize media data in
packets, but just wrap a monolithic byte stream that is described by a
header. This is good enough for PCM, which uses fixed frames (a single
sample for all audio channels), and for which it would be too expensive
to have per frame headers.
libavformat (and mpv) is heavily packet based, and using a single packet
for each PCM frame causes too much overhead. So they typically "bundle"
multiple frames into a single packet. This packet size is obviously
arbitrary, and in libavformat's case hardcoded in its source code.
The problem is that seeking doesn't respect this arbitrary packet
boundary. Seeking is sample accurate. You can essentially seek inside a
packet. The resulting packets will not be aligned with previously
demuxed packets. This is normally OK.
Backward seeking (and some other demuxer layer features) expect that
demuxing an earlier demuxed file position eventually results in the same
packets, regardless of the seeks that were done to get there. I like to
call this "deterministic" demuxing. Backward demuxing in particular
requires this to avoid overlaps, which would make it rather hard to get
continuous output.
Fix this issue by detecting wav and hopefully other raw audio formats
with a heuristic (even PCM needs to be detected as heuristic). Then, if
a seek is requested, align the seek timestamps on the guessed number of
samples in the audio packets returned by the demuxer.
The heuristic excludes files with multiple streams. (Except "attachment"
video streams, which could be an ID3 tag. Yes, FFmpeg allows ID3 tags on
WAV files.) Such files will inherently use the packet concept in some
way.
We don't know how the demuxer chooses the internal packet size, but we
assume that it's fixed and aligned to PCM frame sizes. The frame size is
most likely given by block_align (the native wav frame size, according
to Microsoft). We possibly need to explicitly read and discard a packet
if the seek is done without reading anything before that. We ignore any
subsequent packet sizes; we need to avoid the very last packet, which
likely has a different size.
This hack should be rather benign. In the worst case, it will "round"
the seek target a little, but the maximum rounding amount is bounded.
Maybe we _could_ round up if SEEK_FORWARD is specified, but I didn't
bother.
An earlier commit fixed the same issue for mpv's demux_raw.
An alternative, and probably much better solution would be clipping
decoded data by timestamp. demux.c could allow the type of overlap the
wav demuxer introduces, and instruct the decoder to clip the output
against the last decoded timestamp. There's already an infrastructure
for this (demux_packet.end field) used by EDL/ordered chapters.
Although this sounds like a good solution, mpv unfortunately uses floats
for timestamps. The rounding errors break sample accuracy. Even if you
used integers, you'd need a timebase that is sample accurate (not always
easy, since EDL can merge tracks with different sample rates).
Yay, more subtle state on top of this nightmarish, fragile state
machine. But this is what happens when you subvert the laws of nature.
This simple checks where playback should "resume" from when no packets
were returned to the decoder yet after the seek that initiated backward
playback. The main purpose is to process the first returned keyframe
range in the same way like all other ranges. This ensures that things
like preroll are included properly.
Before this commit, it could for example have happened that the start of
the first audio frame was slightly broken, because no preroll was
included. Since the audio frame is reversed before sending it to the
audio output, it would have added an audible discontinuity before the
second frame was played; all subsequent frames would have been fine.
(Although I didn't test and confirm this particular issue.)
In future, this could be useful for certain other things.
At least the condition for delaying the backstep seek becomes simpler
and more explicit.
Move the code that attempts to start demuxing up in dequeue_packet.
Before, it was not called when the stream was in back_restarting state.
This commit makes streams be in back_restarting state at initialization,
so the demuxer would never have started reading.
Likewise, we need to call back_demux_see_packets() right after seek in
case the seek was within the cache. (We don't bother with checking
whether it was a cached seek; nothing happens if it was a normal one.)
There is nothing else that would process these cached packets
explicitly, although coincidences could sporadically trigger it.
The check for back_restart_next in find_backward_restart_pos() now
decides whether to use this EOF special code. Since the backward
playback start state also sets this variable, we don't need some of
the complex checks in dequeue_packet() anymore either.
As well as other filtering. I was writing this with the assumption that
timestamps go backwards (which I first planned to do). But in fact,
timestamps go forward, frame durations are positive, and adding a frame
duration to a timestamp yields the correct result. The only strange
thing is that timestamps are negative.
Also, media of course goes backwards. In other possible implementation,
filters would see normal forward playback, interrupted by seeks or
discontinuities. It turns out the current implementation of providing a
continuous backward media stream is probably better for filters.
Even deinterlacing seems to work. libavcodec always outputs fields in as
interleaved frames (i.e. fields are not reversed), and making up
timestamps for the new frames (when doubling the framerate) works
exactly like like in the forward case.
Actually the previous paragraph was a lie, and libavcodec does not
output fields as interleaved frames in rare cases. Sometimes AVFrame
contains single fields. In this case you'd need to inverse the field
dominance for deinterlacing filters to work correctly.
The way backward playback is implemented doesn't break basic assumptions
about timestamps after the decoder, so I guess all the encoding mode
needs to do is to adjust for the start offset, which it already does.
Though I might be wrong and my test was possibly flawed.
Stream recording on the other hand will fail immediately with
--record-file, and --stream-record will probably yield unexpected
results if any backstep seeks are done.
Make --audio-backward-overlap default to 2 for Opus. I have no idea why
this is needed. It seems to fix backward decoding though (going purely
by listening).
Normally, this should not be needed, since initial padding is completely
contained within the first packet (normally, and in the case I tested).
So the 2nd packet/frame should be fine, but for some unknown reason it
works only with the 3rd.
The only reasonable solution to this is probably to make discarding of
preroll frames based on timestmaps, instead of frame/packet count. But
then you get issues with video and its dumb timestamp reordering. So for
now, fuck it.
This seems more useful in general. This change also happens to fix a
miscounting of preroll packets when some of them were "rounded" away,
and which could make it stuck.
Also a simple intra-refresh encode with x264 (and muxed to mkv by it)
seems to work now. I guess I misinterpreted earlier results.
Backstepping still could get "stuck" if the demuxer didn't seek far back
enough. This commit fixes getting stuck if playing backwards from the
end, and audio has ended much earlier than the video.
In commit "demux: fix initial backward demuxing state in some cases",
I claimed that the backward seek semantics ("snapping" backward in
normal seeking, unrelated to backward playing) would take care of
this. Unfortunately, this is not always quite true.
In theory, a seek to any position (that does not use SEEK_FORWARD, i.e.
backward snapping) should return a packet for every stream. But I have a
mkv sample, where audio ends much earlier than video. Its mkvmerge
created index does not have entries for audio packets, so the video
index is used. This index has its last entry somewhere close after the
end of audio. So no audio packets will be returned. With a "too small"
back_seek_size, the demuxer will retry a seek target that ends up in
this place forever. (This does not happen if you use --index=recreate.
It also doesn't happen with libavformat, which always prefers its own
index, while mpv's internal mkv demuxer strictly prefers the index from
the file if it can be read.)
Fix this by adding the back_seek_size every time we fail to see enough
packets. This way the seek step can add up until it works.
To prevent that back_seek_pos just "runs away" towards negative infinity
by subtracting back_seek_size every time we back step to undo forward
reading (e.g. if --no-cache is used), readjust the back_seek_pos to the
lowest known resume position. (If the cache is active, kf_seek_pts can
be used, but to work in all situations, the code needs to grab the
minimum PTS in the keyframe range.)
Just rearranging shit. Setting SEEK_HR for backstep seeks actually
doesn't have much meaning, but disables the weird audio snapping for
"keyframe" seeks, and I don't know it's late.
This code used to be simpler, but now it's enough that it should be
factored into a single function.
Both uses of the new function are annoyingly different. The first use is
the special case when a decoder tries to read packets, but the demuxer
doesn't see any (like mp4 files with sparse video packets, which
actually turned out to be chapter thumbnail "tracks"). Then the other
stream queues will overflow, and the stream with no packets is marked
EOF to avoid stalling playback.
The second case is when the demxuer returns global EOF.
It would be more awkward to have the loop iterating the streams in the
function, because then you'd need a weird parameter to control the
behavior.
Just "mpv file.mkv --play-direction=backward" did not work, because
backward demuxing from the very end was not implemented. This is another
corner case, because the resume mechanism so far requires a packet
"position" (dts or pos) as reference. Now "EOF" is another possible
reference.
Also, the backstep mechanism could cause streams to find different
playback start positions, basically leading to random playback start
(instead of what you specified with --start). This happens only if
backstep seeks are involved (i.e. no cached data yet), but since this is
usually the case at playback start, it always happened. It was racy too,
because it depended on the order the decoders on other threads requested
new data. The comment below "resume_earlier" has some more blabla.
Some other details are changed.
I'm giving up on the "from_cache" parameter, and don't try to detect the
situation when the demuxer does not seek properly. Instead, always seek
back, hopefully some more.
Instead of trying to adjust the backstep seek target by a random value
of 1.0 seconds. Instead, always rely on the random value provided by the
user via --demuxer-backward-playback-step. If the demuxer should really
get "stuck" and somehow miss the seek target badly, or the user sets the
option value to 0, then the demuxer will not make any progress and just
eat CPU. (Although due to backward seek semantics used for backstep
seeks, even a very small seek step size will work. Just not 0.)
It seems this also fixes backstepping correctly when the initial seek
ended at the last keyframe range. (The explanation above was about the
case when it ends at EOF. These two cases are different. In the former,
you just need to step to the previous keyframe range, which was broken
because it didn't always react correctly to reaching EOF. In the latter,
you need to do a separate search for the last keyframe.)
wm4