gst-play vs ffplay efficiency?

[Nicolas Dufresne]

Le dimanche 28 mars 2021 à 15:15 -0600, amindfv at mailbox.org a écrit :
> Not sure how I haven't noticed this before now, but:
> 
> When seeking with arrow keys, for everything from very low-res to very high-res video, gst-play has a noticeable lag, vs. ffplay which seems to immediately seek.
> 
> Also, for very high-res videos gst-play playback gets quite choppy while ffplay doesn't.
> 
> I'm running older versions of both players - the ones from Debian stable (gst-play-1.0 version 1.14.4 / ffplay version 4.1.6-1~deb10u1). Possibly a cause.

It would be more fair to compare against latest GStreamer of course. Now, it's
likely ffmpeg seeking is more efficient, but before jumping to conclusion, you
have to make sure you compare apple-to-apple. GStreamer provides a multitude of
seek operations, which yield different speeds.  gst-play-1.0 is using
GST_SEEK_FLAG_ACCURATE, which is one of the slowest, but also one which will
vary in performance considering how far from a keyframe you seek. It will also
be affected by how the stream was encoded, like the distance between keyframes.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gst-plugins-base/-/blob/master/tools/gst-play.c#L992

Nicolas

> 
> Is this to be expected?
> 
> Thanks!
> Tom
> 
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