[Libav-user] MPEG2 decoding pixelation problem (but not in ffplay)

[Michael Goffioul]

On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 7:05 PM, Jaka Bac <jakabac at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Michael,
>
> mpeg2video wants the packets to be segmented in a way that logical things
> go together and that there is no extra "garbage" at the end.
> One problem that you have is that your code will feed mpeg2video with last
> frame in a GOP and the sequence header of the next gop after it. That is
> not desired by mpeg2video.
>

You're right. I had done some experiments in the meantime and it indeed
appears one cannot feed data to mpeg2video codec without segmenting into
logical units.


>
> The other problem that you have is that you are triggering undefined
> behaviour with this line in your code:
> p2 = memmem(p1 + 4, n, "\x00\x00\x01\x00", 4);
>
> from address at p1 there is at least n bytes in the buffer if you are
> doing the calculations correctly (which I think that you do).
> but you are searching from p1+4 up n bytes which goes past the end of your
> buffer. If there are 00 after the end of your buffer memmem might find a
> "false" start code.
>

Yup, I also caught that problem and had already fixed it.


>
> I think that the line in question should be:
> p2 = (char*)memmem(p1 + 4, n-4, "\x00\x00\x01\x00", 4);
>
> Probably you can get away with the first problem (headers of the next gop
> after end of previous gop) since you feed the sequence headers at the start
> of the stream to the decoder (the other sequence headers are just repeated
> values)
>

I changed the way I do segmentation, such that sequence and other
non-picture-related headers are isolated and fed separately to the decoder.
This fixed the pixellation problem.


>
> All in all, you would be better off with already tested parsers and
> demuxers from libavformat
>

The sample code was just intended to illustrate the problem, it's not
production code. The full context is that I'm trying to bridge ffmpeg and
ExoPlayer for video decoding. The simple (and wrong) segmentation used in
my sample code is based on the way ExoPlayer is segmenting a MPEG2 video
stream (H262Reader).

The starting point was when I tried to use ExoPlayer with the Google
software MPEG2 decoder available in Android (since Marshmallow). I observed
bad pixellation. ExoPlayer devs put the blame on the MPEG2 decoder from
Google. I then integrated ffmpeg with ExoPlayer for video decoding, but I
was suprized to observe the same bad pixellation. That's how I ended up
writing my sample code, to emulate what ExoPlayer and my ffmpeg integration
were doing. Given that both Google's and ffmpeg's decoder show the same
pixellation, I bet now that the root cause is ExoPlayer's segmentation.

Thanks again for your support, that really helped.

Michael.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/libav-user/attachments/20170606/59f32749/attachment.html>