[gst-devel] related to sync, do we want multi-play buffers?

[Ronald Bultje]

Hey all,

one more crack in my mind: let's say that I'm an AVI demuxer and the
index refers twice to the same frame data subsequently. Or let's say I'm
a video capture device and I just lost a frame and need to duplicate the
previous (or next) one to keep up my framerate (this is part of the A/V
sync mechanism that people *do* agree on), we currently just _push() the
same buffer twice. Shouldn't we make a refcount sort of "usecount"
property on buffers so that we see they can/should be used twice? The
advantage is that a codec like MJPEG can then simply encode the buffer
once instead of twice (saves CPU), or an AVI muxer can write the frame
once with two index entries (well, this breaks when we use large
file/openDML avis, but you still get the point).

So, does this sound like an interesting addition or is it too much of a
hassle?

(as soon as I've figured out what I'm going to do, I'll likely open a
bugzilla feature request for each of the ideas I've had until now so I
don't forget...)

Ronald

-- 
Ronald Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>
Linux Video/Multimedia developer