[mythtv] [mythtv-commits] Ticket #9410: Positioning problems with BBC HD and BBC ONE HD recordings

Paul Gardiner lists at glidos.net
Thu Dec 30 20:31:38 UTC 2010


On 30/12/2010 20:05, Taylor Ralph wrote:
>>
>> Not quite gotten to trying this out yet. Wanted to first try to
>> understand what it happening. Is the following anything anywhere near
>> how it works?
>>
>> While the frontend is playing a recording, the backend is parsing the
>> stream.
>
> Basically the frontend player uses the position map that is generated
> during the recording or the commercial flagging process. This table
> gets stored in the database by the backend recorder or commercial
> flagger and the frontend uses it when playing back the recording to
> know where the keyframes are relative to the file position.

Ah right. I realised just after posting that my description
couldn't be quite right because you'd already said that regenerating
the position map was necessary after making the change. So the
code path we've been referring to is used during recording rather
than playback, and also in commercial flagging? Both use instances of 
AvFormatDecoder? Is it used for anything else? Just interested.

> Yes, the hack is to just assume one complete frame per packet which is
> not always correct but appears to be in the case of BBC and BBC1 HD.
>
> As Gavin has noted this could cause problems for other recordings if
> this assumption isn't true and would require you to remove the hack
> and recreate you position maps by re-running the commercial flagger
> again. But do this at your own risk. It however is unlikely to
> spontaneously catch your system on fire or anything like that. Just
> log another ticket if that happens since it's probably unrelated.
>
> And remember, if you do try the hack, be sure to re-run commercial
> flagger for all the recordings that have been incorrectly flagged.
>
> Good luck and enjoy.

Yeah, it wasn't that I thought the workaround might be risky. I
was just interested in understanding it, and also wondering if I
could help out more by actually doing the proper fix, but I guess
that requires fixing the low level H264 parser to recognise cases
its not actually handling, and that in turn would require poring
through the h264 spec.

Cheers,
	Paul.


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