This should result in no worse accuracy than the base parse element, and may
result in better accuracy. In particular, the number of bytes processed at any
given point, as accumulated by baseparse, can be only accurate to
(1 / # of frames) bytes per second, and if we try to seek immediately after
pausing the pipeline to a large offset, this small inaccuracy can propagate to
something noticeable.
The use case that prompted this patch is a 45-minute MPEG-1 layer 3 file, which
has a constant bit rate but no seek tables. Trying to seek the pipeline
immediately after pauisng it, without the ACCURATE flag, to a location 41
minutes in, yields a location that is, even with <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer/merge_requests/374>,
still audibly incorrect. This patch yields a much closer position, no longer
audibly incorrect, and likely within a frame of the most correct position.
Even if VBR headers are missing, we can't guarantee that a stream is in
fact a CBR stream, so it's safer to let baseparse calculate the average
bitrate rather than assume a CBR stream. However, in order to make
/some/ metadata available before the requisite number of frames have
been parsed, this posts the bitrate from the non-VBR headers as the
nominal bitrate.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641858