[pulseaudio-discuss] How to control playback start timing (RAOP)

[Hajime Fujita]

Hi Tanu,

Thank you for the message.

Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-10-16 at 22:04 -0500, Hajime Fujita wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been working on raop2 support for the raop module.
>>
>> Currently when starting playback through RAOP, there is a huge delay in
>> sound. 2-3 sec after starting music from a player software, actual sound
>> starts being heard from the speaker.
>> And as a result, there is a gap between a screen and sound. For example,
>> progress counter of a player software shows "00:03" when the actual
>> music begins. This would be a serious issue when playing movie.
>>
>> I'm wondering how I can solve this issue. I think most of the delay is
>> due to protocol initialization and impossible to reduce. So the feasible
>> approach might be to tell the application that playback is not yet ready.
>>
>> Is there any document or existing module from which I can learn some
>> idea to address this issue?
> 
> If you want lip-sync with movies, you "only" need to provide accurate
> latency information in your sink implementation. The latency reporting
> is done by handling the PA_SINK_MESSAGE_GET_LATENCY message. It seems
> that module-raop-sink.c (the version in upstream) already tries pretty
> hard to estimate the latency accurately. I think the logic depends on
> TCP's flow control, though, and if I recall correctly, you were working
> on UDP support. Does the RAOP protocol have any latency reporting
> functionality? If not, then you can only guess what the real latency is.

That's right. RAOP2 is using UDP and the current technique in upstream
does not seem to work. I'm not sure if there is an explicit latency
notification in RAOP2 protocol[1], but I think I can somehow estimate
the timing using several timing packets and so on.

Before figuring out how to estimate the accurate latency, I tried to
return a large (~2-3 sec) latency upon PA_SINK_MESSAGE_GET_LATENCY
message to see what happens.
(BTW, the handler is supposed to return microseconds, right?)

It seems that timing gap between pictures and sound gets better in
general, but I experienced a few issues.

1. I got several "Implicit underrun" once in about every 15s.

(  78.834|   1.289) D: [raop-sink] protocol-native.c: Implicit underrun
of 'audio stream'
(  78.835|   0.001) D: [raop-sink] protocol-native.c: Requesting rewind
due to rewrite.
(  78.835|   0.000) D: [raop-sink] sink-input.c: Requesting rewind due
to corking
(  78.836|   0.000) D: [raop-sink] module-raop-sink.c: RAOP: IDLE

The last line "RAOP: IDLE" means that the sink module got PA_SINK_IDLE
message.
When I get this message, there's an interruption in sound.

2. There's still a huge timing gap right after starting playback. Once I
get an interruption which I mentioned above, the gap seems to be reduced.

Any ideas, or suggestions?


[1]: There's a header named "Audio-Latency" in some response, but
apparently it's not working or at least we don't know how to interpret
the number correctly.


Thanks,
Hajime