[gst-devel] oggdemux, chained streams and slow sources

[Andy Hanton]

I am working on playing back songs off of a Rio Karma portable player. 
I have a working source that can read and write songs on the device. 
The device can only be accessed from Linux over ethernet.  It isn't
particularly fast.  I haven't been able to get it to download faster
than about 200K/s.  I can play back songs in flac and mp3 format, but
there is a large delay when attempting to play a vorbis file.  

The oggdemux plugin seems to read in the entire file before it starts
playing in order to find all of the chained streams.  This isn't too bad
when the file is local, but in my case it delays playback of a 5MB file
by 20 seconds.  I would guess that reading a complete movie in theora
format off of a file server on a 100mbit lan might take over a minutes. 

>From a quick look at the ogg specification, reading the whole file isn't
necessary unless the application intends to present the chained streams
as a single song or movie.  I think that responsiveness is probably more
important than the ability to play chained streams.  I don't think that
the chained streams feature is very useful for users anyway.  

Would it be acceptable to turn off this feature?