A common problem for audio-playback is that the timestamps might not
be completely linear. This is specially common when doing streaming over
a network, where you can have jittery and/or bursty packettransmission,
which again will often be reflected on the buffertimestamps.
Now, the current implementation have a threshold that says how far the
buffertimestamp is allowed o drift from the ideal aligned time in the
ringbuffer. This was an instant reaction, and ment that if one buffer
arrived with a timestamp that would breach the drift-tolerance, a resync
would take place, and the result would be an audible gap for the
listener.
The annoying thing would be that in the case of a "timestamp-outlier",
you would first resync one way, say +100ms, and then, if the next
timestamp was "back on track", you would end up resyncing the other way
(-100ms) So in fact, when you had only one buffer with slightly off
timestamping, you would end up with *two* audible gaps. This is the
problem this patch addresses.
The way to "fix" this problem with the previous implementation, would
have been to increase the "drift-tolerance" to a value that was greater
than the largest timestamp-outlier one would normally expect. The big
problem with this approach, however, is that it will allow normal
operations with a huge offset timestamp vs running-time, which is
detrimental to lip-sync. If the drift-tolerance is set to 200ms, it
basically means that lip-sync can easily end up being off by that much.
This patch will basically start a timer when the first breach of
drift-tolerance is detected. If any following timestamp for the next n
nanoseconds gets "back on track" within the threshold, it has basically
eliminated the effect of an outlier, and the timer is stopped. If,
however, all timestamps within this time-limit are breaching the
threshold, we are probably facing a more permanent offset in the
timestamps, and a resync is allowed to happen.
So basically this patch offers something as rare as both higher
accuracy, it terms of allowing smaller drift-tolerances, as well as much
smoother, less glitchy playback!
Commit message and improvments by Havard Graff.
Fixes bug #640859.
This reverts commit 11e375486e.
GST_BOILERPLATE() can't define an abstract type and
G_DEFINE_ABSTRACT_TYPE() does not pass the class struct to
the instance_init function and there's no way to get the
class struct of the current type in instance_init().
The /*< ... >*/ style is only used for public|protected|private,
signal comments use /* signals */. This prevents the some code
parsers/binding generators to be confused by the comment.
