All relevant authors of the current code have agreed.
As always, there are the usual historical artifacts that could be
mentioned. For example, there used to be a large number of decoders
by various authors who were not asked, but whose code was all 100%
removed. (Mostly due to FFmpeg providing all codecs.)
One point of contention is that Nick Kurshev might have refactored the
old audio decoder code in 2001. Basically, there are hints that it might
have been done by him, such as Arpi's commit message stating that the
code was imported from MPlayerXP (Nick's fork), or all the files having
his name in the "maintainer" field. On the other hand, the murky history
of ad.h weakens this - it could be that Arpi started this work, and Nick
took it (and possibly finished it).
In any case, Nick could not be reached, so there is no agreement for
LGPL relicensing from him. We're changing the license anyway, and assume
that his change in itself is not copyrightable. He only moved code, and
in addition used the equivalent video decoder framework (done by Arpi,
who agreed) as template. For example, ad_functions_s was basically
vd_functions_s, which the signature of the decode callback changed to
the same as audio_decode(). ad_functions_s also had a comment that said
it interfaces with "video decoder drivers" (I'm fixing this comment in
this commit).
I verified that no additional code was added that is copyright-relevant,
still in today's code, and not copied from the existing code at the time
(either from the previous audio decoder code or the video framework
code). What apparently matters here is that none of the old code was not
written by Nick, and the authors of the old code have given his
agreement, and (probably) that Nick didn't add actual new code (none
that would have survived), that was not trivially based on the old one
(i.e. no new copyrightable "work").
A copyright expert told me that this kind of change can be considered
not relevant for copyright, so here we go.
Rewriting this would end with the same code anyway, and the naming
conventions can't be copyrighted.
Remove ad_spdif from the normal codec list, and select it explicitly.
One goal was to decouple this from the normal codec selection, so
they're less entangled and the decoder selection code can be simplified
in the far future. This means spdif codec selection is now done
explicitly via select_spdif_codec(). We can also remove the weird
requirements on "dts" and "dts-hd" for the --audio-spdif option, and it
can just do the right thing.
Now both video and audio codecs consist of a single codec family each,
vd_lavc and ad_lavc.
This uses a different method to piece segments together. The old
approach basically changes to a new file (with a new start offset) any
time a segment ends. This meant waiting for audio/video end on segment
end, and then changing to the new segment all at once. It had a very
weird impact on the playback core, and some things (like truly gapless
segment transitions, or frame backstepping) just didn't work.
The new approach adds the demux_timeline pseudo-demuxer, which presents
an uniform packet stream from the many segments. This is pretty similar
to how ordered chapters are implemented everywhere else. It also reminds
of the FFmpeg concat pseudo-demuxer.
The "pure" version of this approach doesn't work though. Segments can
actually have different codec configurations (different extradata), and
subtitles are most likely broken too. (Subtitles have multiple corner
cases which break the pure stream-concatenation approach completely.)
To counter this, we do two things:
- Reinit the decoder with each segment. We go as far as allowing
concatenating files with completely different codecs for the sake
of EDL (which also uses the timeline infrastructure). A "lighter"
approach would try to make use of decoder mechanism to update e.g.
the extradata, but that seems fragile.
- Clip decoded data to segment boundaries. This is equivalent to
normal playback core mechanisms like hr-seek, but now the playback
core doesn't need to care about these things.
These two mechanisms are equivalent to what happened in the old
implementation, except they don't happen in the playback core anymore.
In other words, the playback core is completely relieved from timeline
implementation details. (Which honestly is exactly what I'm trying to
do here. I don't think ordered chapter behavior deserves improvement,
even if it's bad - but I want to get it out from the playback core.)
There is code duplication between audio and video decoder common code.
This is awful and could be shareable - but this will happen later.
Note that the audio path has some code to clip audio frames for the
purpose of codec preroll/gapless handling, but it's not shared as
sharing it would cause more pain than it would help.
Will be helpful for the coming filter support. I planned on merging
audio/video decoding, but this will have to wait a bit longer, so only
remove the duplicate status codes.
Similar to the video path. dec_audio.c now handles decoding only. It
also looks very similar to dec_video.c, and actually contains some of
the rewritten code from it. (A further goal might be unifying the
decoders, I guess.)
High potential for regressions.
Seems useless.
This only helped in one case: one audio stream in the sample
av_find_best_stream_fails.ts had a AC3 packets which couldn't be
decoded, and for which avcodec_decode_audio4() returned 0 forever. In
this specific case, playback will now not start, and you have to
deselect audio manually.
(If someone complains, the old behavior might be restored, but
differently.)
Also remove the stale "bitrate" field.
This is another attempt at making files with sparse video frames work
better.
The problem is that you generally can't know whether a jump in video
timestamps is just a (very) long video frame, or a timestamp reset. Due
to the existence of files with sparse video frames (new frame only every
few seconds or longer), every heuristic will be arbitrary (in general,
at least).
But we can use the fact that if video is continuous, audio should also
be continuous. Audio discontinuities can be easily detected, and if that
happens, reset some of the playback state.
The way the playback state is reset is rather radical (resets decoders
as well), but it's just better not to cause too much obscure stuff to
happen here. If the A/V sync code were to be rewritten, it should
probably strictly use PTS values (not this strange time_frame/delay
stuff), which would make it much easier to detect such situations and
to react to them.
The previous commit handled not falling back to normal decoding if the
AO was reloaded (I think...), and this tries to re-engage spdif pass-
through if it was previously falling back to normal decoding (e.g.
because it temporarily switched to an audio device incapable of
passthrough).
This provides a new method for enabling spdif passthrough. The old
method via --ad (--ad=spdif:ac3 etc.) is deprecated. The deprecated
method will probably stop working at some point.
This also supports PCM fallback. One caveat is that it will lose at
least 1 audio packet in doing so. (I don't care enough to prevent this.)
(This is named after the old S/PDIF connector, because it uses the same
underlying technology as far as the higher level protoco is concerned.
Also, the user should be renamed that passthrough is backwards.)
This rewrites the audio decode loop to some degree. Audio filters don't
do refcounted frames yet, so af.c contains a hacky "emulation".
Remove some of the weird heuristic-heavy code in dec_audio.c. Instead of
estimating how much audio we need to filter, we always filter full
frames. Maybe this should be adjusted later: in case filtering increases
the volume of the audio data, we should try not to buffer too much
filter output by reducing the input that is fed at once.
For ad_spdif.c and ad_mpg123.c, we don't avoid extra copying yet - it
doesn't seem worth the trouble.
There's no real reason why audio_init_filter() should exist. Just use
af_init or af_reinit directly. (We lose a useless message; the same
information is printed in a quite close place with more details.)
Requires less code, and the way the filter chain is marked as having
failed to initialize allows just switching off audio instead of
crashing if trying to insert a volume filter in mixer.c fails, and
recreating the old filter chain fails too.
It probably happens relatively often that the first packet (or even the
first N packets) of a stream will fail to decode, but decoding will
eventually succeed at a later point. Before commit 261506e3, this was
handled by an explicit retry loop (although this was also for other
purposes), but with then was changed to abort on the first error. This
makes it impossible to decode some audio streams.
Change this so that errors are ignored for the first 50 packets, which
should make it equivalent to the old code.
This commit makes audio decoding non-blocking. If e.g. the network is
too slow the playloop will just go to sleep, instead of blocking until
enough data is available.
For video, this was already done with commit 7083f88c. For audio, it's
unfortunately much more complicated, because the audio decoder was used
in a blocking manner. Large changes are required to get around this.
The whole playback restart mechanism must be turned into a statemachine,
especially since it has close interactions with video restart. Lots of
video code is thus also changed.
(For the record, I don't think switching this code to threads would
make this conceptually easier: the code would still have to deal with
external input while blocked, so these in-between states do get visible
[and thus need to be handled] anyway. On the other hand, it certainly
should be possible to modularize this code a bit better.)
This will probably cause a bunch of regressions.
Don't return an EOF code if there's still buffered data.
Also, don't call demux_stream_eof() in the playloop. There's probably
nothing wrong with it, but it's cleaner not to use it.
Also give AD_EOF its own value, so that a decoding error doesn't drain
audio by causing an EOF condition.
This commit mainly moves the initial decoding of data (done to probe the
audio format) to generic code. This will make it easier to make audio
decoding non-blocking in a later commit.
This commit also changes how decoders return data: instead of having
them write the data into a prepared buffer, they return a reference to
an internal buffer (by setting dec_audio.decoded). This makes it
significantly easier to handle audio format changes, since the decoders
don't really need to care anymore.
These used the suffix _resync_stream, which is a bit misleading. Nothing
gets "resynchronized", they really just reset state.
(Some audio decoders actually used to "resync" by reading packets for
resuming playback, but that's not the case anymore.)
Also move the function in dec_video.c to the top of the file.
sh_audio is supposed to contain file headers, not whatever was decoded.
Fix this, and write the decoded format to separate fields in the decoder
context, the dec_audio.decoded field. (Note that this field is really
only needed to communicate the audio format from decoder driver to the
generic code, so no other code accesses it.)
Move all state that basically changes during decoding or is needed in
order to manage decoding itself into a new struct (dec_audio).
sh_audio (defined in stheader.h) is supposed to be the audio stream
header. This should reflect the file headers for the stream. Putting the
decoder context there is strange design, to say the least.
Replace the code that used a single buffer with mp_audio_buffer. This
also enables non-interleaved output operation, although it's still
disabled, and no AO supports it yet.
Make the VF/VO/AO option parser available to audio filters. No audio
filter uses this yet, but it's still a quite intrusive change.
In particular, the commands for manipulating filters at runtime
completely change. We delete the old code, and use the same
infrastructure as for video filters. (This forces complete
reinitialization of the filter chain, which hopefully isn't a problem
for any use cases. The old code forced reinitialization too, but it
could potentially allow a filter to cache things; e.g. consider loaded
ladspa plugins and such.)
This actually breaks audio for 5/6/8 channels. There's no reordering
done yet. The actual reordering will be done inside of af_lavrresample
and has to be made part of the format negotiation.
Use codec names instead of FourCCs to identify codecs. Rewrite how
codecs are selected and initialized. Now each decoder exports a list
of decoders (and the codec it supports) via add_decoders(). The order
matters, and the first decoder for a given decoder is preferred over
the other decoders. E.g. all ad_mpg123 decoders are preferred over
ad_lavc, because it comes first in the mpcodecs_ad_drivers array.
Likewise, decoders within ad_lavc that are enumerated first by
libavcodec (using av_codec_next()) are preferred. (This is actually
critical to select h264 software decoding by default instead of vdpau.
libavcodec and ffmpeg/avconv use the same method to select decoders by
default, so we hope this is sane.)
The codec names follow libavcodec's codec names as defined by
AVCodecDescriptor.name (see libavcodec/codec_desc.c). Some decoders
have names different from the canonical codec name. The AVCodecDescriptor
API is relatively new, so we need a compatibility layer for older
libavcodec versions for codec names that are referenced internally,
and which are different from the decoder name. (Add a configure check
for that, because checking versions is getting way too messy.)
demux/codec_tags.c is generated from the former codecs.conf (minus
"special" decoders like vdpau, and excluding the mappings that are the
same as the mappings libavformat's exported RIFF tables). It contains
all the mappings from FourCCs to codec name. This is needed for
demux_mkv, demux_mpg, demux_avi and demux_asf. demux_lavf will set the
codec as determined by libavformat, while the other demuxers have to do
this on their own, using the mp_set_audio/video_codec_from_tag()
functions. Note that the sh_audio/video->format members don't uniquely
identify the codec anymore, and sh->codec takes over this role.
Replace the --ac/--vc/--afm/--vfm with new --vd/--ad options, which
provide cover the functionality of the removed switched.
Note: there's no CODECS_FLAG_FLIP flag anymore. This means some obscure
container/video combinations (e.g. the sample Film_200_zygo_pro.mov)
are played flipped. ffplay/avplay doesn't handle this properly either,
so we don't care and blame ffmeg/libav instead.
Finish renaming directories and moving files. Adjust all include
statements to make the previous commit compile.
The two commits are separate, because git is bad at tracking renames
and content changes at the same time.
Also take this as an opportunity to remove the separation between
"common" and "mplayer" sources in the Makefile. ("common" used to be
shared between mplayer and mencoder.)
Tis drops the silly lib prefixes, and attempts to organize the tree in
a more logical way. Make the top-level directory less cluttered as
well.
Renames the following directories:
libaf -> audio/filter
libao2 -> audio/out
libvo -> video/out
libmpdemux -> demux
Split libmpcodecs:
vf* -> video/filter
vd*, dec_video.* -> video/decode
mp_image*, img_format*, ... -> video/
ad*, dec_audio.* -> audio/decode
libaf/format.* is moved to audio/ - this is similar to how mp_image.*
is located in video/.
Move most top-level .c/.h files to core. (talloc.c/.h is left on top-
level, because it's external.) Park some of the more annoying files
in compat/. Some of these are relicts from the time mplayer used
ffmpeg internals.
sub/ is not split, because it's too much of a mess (subtitle code is
mixed with OSD display and rendering).
Maybe the organization of core is not ideal: it mixes playback core
(like mplayer.c) and utility helpers (like bstr.c/h). Should the need
arise, the playback core will be moved somewhere else, while core
contains all helper and common code.