This mechanism originates from MPlayer's way of dealing with blocking
network, but it's still useful. On opening and closing, mpv waits for
network synchronously, and also some obscure commands and use-cases can
lead to such blocking. In these situations, the stream is asynchronously
forced to stop by "interrupting" it.
The old design interrupting I/O was a bit broken: polling with a
callback, instead of actively interrupting it. Change the direction of
this. There is no callback anymore, and the player calls
mp_cancel_trigger() to force the stream to return.
libavformat (via stream_lavf.c) has the old broken design, and fixing it
would require fixing libavformat, which won't happen so quickly. So we
have to keep that part. But everything above the stream layer is
prepared for a better design, and more sophisticated methods than
mp_cancel_test() could be easily introduced.
There's still one problem: commands are still run in the central
playback loop, which we assume can block on I/O in the worst case.
That's not a problem yet, because we simply mark some commands as being
able to stop playback of the current file ("quit" etc.), so input.c
could abort playback as soon as such a command is queued. But there are
also commands abort playback only conditionally, and the logic for that
is in the playback core and thus "unreachable". For example,
"playlist_next" aborts playback only if there's a next file. We don't
want it to always abort playback.
As a quite ugly hack, abort playback only if at least 2 abort commands
are queued - this pretty much happens only if the core is frozen and
doesn't react to input.
Apparently, it is popular to store large files in uncompressed rar
archives. Extracting files is not practical, and some media players
suport playing directly from uncompressed rar (at least VLC and some
DirectShow components).
Storing or accessing files this way is completely idiotic, but it is
a common practice, and the ones subjected to this practice can't do
much to change this (at least that's what I assume/hope). Also, it's
a feature request, so we say yes.
This code is mostly taken from VLC (commit f6e7240 from their git tree).
We also copy the way this is done: opening a rar file by itself yields
a playlist, which contains URLs to the actual entries in the rar file.
Compressed entries are simply skipped.