fengalin / media-toc

Build a table of contents from a media file or split a media file into chapters
MIT License
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Reuse `GstBuffer` as much as possible #127

Open fengalin opened 6 years ago

fengalin commented 6 years ago

The AudioBuffer / WaveformBuffer design is now pretty close to the point where it would no longer be necessary to keep up to 30s of samples in AudioBuffer. When a seek back is performed, a mechanism allows holding WaveImage rendering until enough samples are available. This means that we could also remove the code that deals with merging existing samples with incoming ones.

Considering that, current design could transition to this:

On the DoubleAudioBuffer could select whether or not to swap the WaveformBuffers depending on the last buffer handling status. Current working buffer could be filled (converting samples to pixels on the fly) until the exposed buffer window range becomes too short, marking the buffer as handled by the working buffer, then the WaveformBuffers would be swapped. When a buffer has been handled by both WaveformBuffers the buffer is dropped.

This would avoid copying samples in the AudioBuffer (we would just get a reference on the GstBuffer) saving CPU cycles and memory. The only new cost would be induced by the double conversion samples -> pixels. It should be possible to use SIMD to handle multiple samples at once (either several channels or several consecutive samples at once).

fengalin commented 5 years ago

Instead of using flags indicating whether the WaveformBuffer has already been handled, it should be possible to use dedicated Buffer queues for each WaveformBuffer. Buffers memory would not be duplicated and each buffer would pop buffers from the queue and the reference counting mechanism would take care of releasing memory when possible.

fengalin commented 5 years ago

While it should be possible to avoid copying the gst::Buffers, we are bound to keeping the history mechanism as we need it to render with new sample steps after a zoom in / out.