[FFmpeg-devel] Supporting container formats with PTS gaps (Ogg)

[Robert Swain]

2009/2/2 M?ns Rullg?rd <mans at mansr.com>:
> Peter Ross <pross at xvid.org> writes:
>> This is adequate for simple playback, but when copying an Ogg file
>> to another format, things break. For example, the ffmpeg program
>> tries to calculate the DTS value from the previous PTS (see
>> output_packet() ffmpeg.c ~1396). There is some other functional
>> cruft in libavformat that attempts to calculate PTS from DTS
>> (compute_pkt_fields2() in libavformat/utils.c ~2548).
>
> I consider this mess a flaw in the FFmpeg design.  Some formats
> provide only occasional timestamps, and there is no generic way to
> find the missing timestamps without (more or less) decoding the
> elementary streams.  The current approach seems to be vigorous denial
> of this, and a half-baked attempt at inventing the missing
> timestamps.  More often than not this fails, resulting in the infamous
> "non-monotone timestamps" error when stream-copying.

This issue seems to come up quite a lot. What can be done to make the
system more robust? Is decoding the elementary streams the only way?
If so, shouldn't this 'brute force' approach at the very least be an
option?

Rob