Dynamic Pipelines

[Tim Müller]

On Mon, 2021-04-12 at 15:15 +0000, Jon Lovewell wrote:

Hi Jon,
 
> I am looking at adding branches to a running pipeline dynamically and
> have run into a problem.
>
>   (snip)
>
> When the pipeline transitions to the playing state I add a timeout
> handler with a 2 second delay to add a branch to the ‘tee’ to display
> the video, the branch looks like this
>  
> “queue ! videoconvert ! capsfilter caps={caps} ! autovideosink”
>  
> Where caps are "video/x-raw, format=NV12, height=240, width=320,
> framerate=30/1"
>  
> The branch is added, linked and synched successfully.  I can see that
> all the elements transition to the playing state except for the video
> sink which only transitions to ‘ready’ and the pipeline transitions
> to paused.  
>  
> If I swap out ‘autovideosink’ for ‘fakesink’ the same thing happens.

Do you have a small self-contained test case that demonstrates the
problem by any chance?

Something to double-check: you write "added, linked, and synched" in
that order, but when you add elements to an already-running pipeline
you really want to do things in this order:

 - add new elements

 - set/sync state (so elements/pads are active before someone tries to
push data into them)

 - link element to the tee (now that the elements the data flows into
are in a non-NULL state).

You can check the GST_DEBUG=*:6 log to see if you find any log lines
about streaming stopping with flow flushing - if you see that, that's
probably an indication that it tried to push data on an element still
in NULL state and then the pipeline will stop silently.

Cheers
 Tim