Media manual

Domain knowledge

This tutorial http://dranger.com/ffmpeg/ffmpeg.html is a good intro for building some domain knowledge. Bear in mind that the tutorial is rather old, and some ffmpeg functions have become deprecated - but the basics are still valid.

In the FFmpeg base code there is the ffplay.c player - a very good way to see how things are managed. In particular, some newer FFmpeg functions are used, while current pyglet media code still uses functions that have now been deprecated.

Current code architecture

The overview of the media code is the following:

Source

Found in media/sources folder.

Source s represent data containing media information. They can come from disk or be created in memory. A Source ‘s responsibility is to read or generate audio and/or video data and then provide it. Essentially, it’s a producer.

FFmpegStreamingSource

One implementation of the StreamingSource is the FFmpegSource. It implements the Source base class by calling FFmpeg functions wrapped by ctypes and found in media/sources/ffmpeg_lib. They offer basic functionalities for handling media streams, such as opening a file, reading stream info, reading a packet, and decoding audio and video packets.

The FFmpegSource maintains two queues, one for audio packets and one for video packets, with a pre-determined maximum size. When the source is loaded, it will read packets from the stream and will fill up the queues until one of them is full. It has then to stop because we never know what type of packet we will get next from the stream. It could be a packet of the same type as the filled up queue, in which case we would not be able to store the additional packet.

Whenever a Player - a consumer of a source - asks for audio data or a video frame, the Source will pop the next packet from the appropriate queue, decode the data, and return the result to the Player. If this results in available space in both audio and video queues, it will read additional packets until one of the queues is full again.

Player

Found in media/player.py

The Player is the main object that drives the source. It maintains an internal sequence of sources or iterator of sources that it can play sequentially. Its responsibilities are to play, pause and seek into the source.

If the source contains audio, the Player will instantiate an AudioPlayer by asking the AudioDriver to create an appropriate AudioPlayer for the given platform. The AudioDriver is a singleton created according to which drivers are available. Currently supported sound drivers are: DirectSound, OpenAL, PulseAudio and XAudio2. A silent audio driver that consumes, but does not play back any audio is also available.

If the source contains video, the Player has a get_texture() method returning the current video frame.

The player has an internal master clock which is used to synchronize the video and the audio. The audio synchronization is delegated to the AudioPlayer. More info found below. The video synchronization is made by asking the Source for the next video timestamp. The Player then schedules on pyglet event loop a call to its update_texture() with a delay equals to the difference between the next video timestamp and the master clock current time.

When update_texture() is called, we will check if the actual master clock time is not too late compared to the video timestamp. This could happen if the loop was very busy and the function could not be called on time. In this case, the frame would be skipped until we find a frame with a suitable timestamp for the current master clock time.

AudioPlayer

Found in media/drivers

The AudioPlayer is responsible for playing the audio data. It reads from the Source, and can be started, stopped or cleared.

In order to accomplish this task, the audio player keeps a reference to the AudioDriver singleton which provides access to the lower level functions for the selected audio driver, and its Player, which it synchronizes with and dispatches events to.

AudioPlayer s are bound to their source’s AudioFormat. Once created, they can not play audio of a different format.

AudioPlayer s will attempt to keep themselves in sync with their associated Player . This is achieved by the _get_and_compensate_audio_data method. The last 8 differences between their estimated audio time and their player’s master clock will be stored for each read chunk of audio data. If the average of this value exceeds a value of 30ms, the player will start to correct itself by either dropping or duplicating a very small amount of samples at a time, 12ms by default. If any single measurement exceeds 280ms, an extreme desync that is noticeable in context of the app is assumed. If the AudioPlayer is running behind the master clock, all of this audio data is skipped and the measurements are reset. When running ahead by more than 280ms, nothing is done but the standard stretchin g of 12ms at a time.

play

When instructed to play, the AudioPlayer will give whatever instructions are necessary to its audio backend in order to start playing itself.

To not run out of data, it will add itself into the PlayerWorkerThread of its audio driver. This thread is typically responsible for asking sources for audio data to prevent the main thread/event loop from locking up on I/O operations. The PlayerWorkerThread will regularly call work on each AudioPlayer.

This method may be called when already playing, and has no effect in that case.

stop

This method causes the AudioPlayer to stop playing its audio stream, or to pause it. It may be restarted with play later-on, which will cause it to continue from where it stopped.

The first thing this method should do is to remove itself from its driver’s PlayerWorkerThread to ensure work won’t be called while it stops.

This method may be called when already stopped, and has no effect in that case.

prefill_audio

This method is called from a Player whenever the AudioPlayer is about to start playing and also before play is called for the first time. The first batch of data is given from here, as backends using a single audio buffer may play undefined data for a short amount of time before the PlayerWorkerThread would load proper audio data in.

This method prefills the ideal amount of data for an AudioPlayer, available in _buffered_data_ideal_size. By default this is given as 900ms of audio, depending on the played source’s audio format.

work

This method is only called from a PlayerWorkerThread, though it may be invoked through prefill_audio. As it is called from a thread, implementing it error-free is difficult.

This method is responsible for refilling audio data if needed and often for dispatching the on_eos() event.

Implementing this method comes with a lot of pitfalls. The following are free to happen in other threads while the method is running:

The player is paused or unpaused.

Audio backends usually accept data for non-playing streams/sources/etc., so this is not too much of a problem. Realistically, this won’t happen, all current implementations contain a call to self.driver.worker.remove/add(self) snippet in their play/stop implementations. That call will return only once the PlayerWorkerThread is done with a work cycle.

In order for these calls to be most reliable, remove should be the first statement in a stop implementation and add the last one in a play implementation, to ensure that work will not be run after/will not start before player attributes have been changed.

The player is deleted.

In order to combat this, self.driver.worker.remove(self) is used in all implementations, ensuring delete calls will not interfere with the work method.

A native callback runs, changing the internal state of the AudioPlayer.

See below; protecting some sections with a lock local to the AudioPlayer. This lock should not be held around the call to _get_and_compensate_audio_data, as that renders the entire step of offloading the loading/decoding work into a PlayerWorkerThread obsolete.

In pseudocode, the general way this method is implemented is:

def work():
    update_play_cursor()
    dispatch_media_events()
    if not source_exhausted:
        if play_cursor_too_close_to_write_cursor():
            get_and_submit_new_audio_data()
            if source_exhausted:
                update_play_cursor()
            else:
                return
        else:
            return
    if play_cursor > write_cursor and not has_underrun:
        has_underrun = True
        dispatch_on_eos()

If native callbacks are involved, running in yet another thread, the flow tends to be different:

def work():
    update_play_cursor()
    dispatch_media_events()
    if not source_exhausted:
        if play_cursor_too_close_to_write_cursor():
            get_and_submit_new_audio_data()
            if has_underrun:
                if source_exhausted:
                    dispatch_eon_eos()
                else:
                    restart_player()
                    has_underrun = False

def on_underrun():
    if source_exhausted:
        dispatch_on_eos()
    else:
        has_underrun = True

High care must be taken to protect appropiate sections (any variables and buffers which get accessed by both callbacks and the work method) with a lock, otherwise the method is open to extremely unlucky issues where the callback is unscheduled in favor of the work method or vice versa, which may cause one of the functions to assume/operate based on a now outdated state.

work won’t stop being called just because it dispatched on_eos. The method must make sure its source did not run out of audio data before to only dispatch this event once.

clear

This method may only be called when the AudioPlayer is not playing. It causes it to discard all buffered data and reset itself to a clean initial state.

delete

This method will cause the AudioPlayer to stop playing and delete all its native resources. In contrast to clear, it may be called at any time. It may be called multiple times and must make sure it won’t delete already deleted resources.

AudioDriver

Found in media/drivers

The AudioDriver is a wrapper around the low-level sound driver available on the platform. It’s a singleton. It can create an AudioPlayer appropriate for the current AudioDriver.

The AudioDriver usually contains a PlayerWorkerThread responsible for keeping each AudioPlayer that is playing filled with data.

The AudioDriver provides an AudioListener, which is used to place a listener in the same space as each AudioPlayer, enabling positional audio.

Normal operation of the Player

The client code instantiates a media player this way:

player = pyglet.media.Player()
source = pyglet.media.load(filename)
player.queue(source)
player.play()

When the client code runs player.play():

The Player will check if there is an audio track on the media. If so it will instantiate an AudioPlayer appropriate for the available sound driver on the platform. It will create an empty Texture if the media contains video frames and will schedule its update_texture() to be called immediately. Finally it will start the master clock.

The AudioPlayer will start playing as described above.

When the update_texture() method is called, the next video timestamp will be checked with the master clock. We allow a delay up to the frame duration. If the master clock is beyond that time, the frame will be skipped. We will check the following frames for its timestamp until we find the appropriate frame for the master clock time. We will set the texture to the new video frame. We will check for the next video frame timestamp and we will schedule a new call to update_texture() with a delay equals to the difference between the next video timestamps and the master clock time.

Helpful tools

I’ve found that using the binary ffprobe is a good way to explore the content of a media file. Here’s a couple of things which might be interesting and helpful:

ffprobe samples_v1.01\SampleVideo_320x240_1mb.3gp -show_frames

This will show information about each frame in the file. You can choose only audio or only video frames by using the v flag for video and a for audio.:

ffprobe samples_v1.01\SampleVideo_320x240_1mb.3gp -show_frames -select_streams v

You can also ask to see a subset of frame information this way:

ffprobe samples_v1.01\SampleVideo_320x240_1mb.3gp -show_frames
-select_streams v -show_entries frame=pkt_pts,pict_type

Finally, you can get a more compact view with the additional compact flag:

ffprobe samples_v1.01SampleVideo_320x240_1mb.3gp -show_frames -select_streams v -show_entries frame=pkt_pts,pict_type -of compact

Convert video to mkv

ffmpeg -i <original_video> -c:v libx264 -preset slow -profile:v high -crf 18
-coder 1 -pix_fmt yuv420p -movflags +faststart -g 30 -bf 2 -c:a aac -b:a 384k
-profile:a aac_low <outputfilename.mkv>