[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] AVPacket.display_duration

[Aurelien Jacobs]

Uoti Urpala wrote:

> On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 21:50 +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 05:35:13PM +0200, Aurelien Jacobs wrote:
> > > For some subtitles track, each AVPacket must carry the display duration
> > > of the contained subtitle.
> > > The attached patch adds a dedicated AVPacket.display_duration field.
> > 
> > Iam not against this, but i would like to understand better for which cases
> > it is needed.
> > 
> > plain UTF-8 and ASCII ?
> > If so does mov, avi, asf, ... support plain UTF-8 and ASCII ?
> > if yes how do they know the display_duration ?
> 
> In http://roundup.mplayerhq.hu/roundup/ffmpeg/issue588 you compare the
> subtitle situation to video and do not see why it would need something
> different. However the subtitle formats that exist in practice DO need
> something extra.

> A video frame implicitly lasts until the next frame overwrites it,

That's where you're wrong. The next frame *don't* overwrites the previous
one. It only modify it (in case of predictive frames).
And the exact same situation happens with subtitles. Let's see the
following example with subtitles A and B:
  A - start: 2 - end: 8
  B - start: 6 - end: 10
Here, subtitle B don't "overwrite previous frame", it only modify it
(by adding one more subtitle line on the screen...).
Now, the display duration of subtitle A is exactly comparable to
the duration a video frame has effect on the following frames
(ie. until further frame don't reuse any data derived from the
original frame, which is often until next key frame).
And this duration is never stored in container for video frames,
it's stored in the video bitstream itself. So it don't sound
very strange to do the same thing for subtitle streams.

Also think about a video codec which contains some kind of
scripted pixmap display (something like shockwave flash...).
This sound awfully similar to ASS subtitles, but still the
display duration of every "pixmap object" wouldn't be stored
in the container...

Aurel