[MPlayer-dev-eng] N-buffering...

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 11:36:03AM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> > Would it help to implement a video fifo of N frames? (Where N is perhaps
> > 5 or 10). This would be like double-buffering but with N frames. If
> > there are occasionally "difficult" frames to decode, the N-buffer would
> > even it out. I realize that the N-buffer would affect A-V sync but that
> > should be possible to solve...
> 
> Not possible to solve in MPlayer's architecture, and in fact this is
> very difficult to solve in any single-task player.

Wouldn't it be possible to move the output buffer into shared memory
and use either a second process or a second thread (depending on the
architecture which is cheaper) to display them at the right time?
It would get most of the threading benefits without having to lock down
mplayer (and the costs associated with that).

Joerg