[opus] preskip and seeking suing Opus

[Jean-Marc Valin]

If you're controlling the encoding and disabling all prediction, you can
reduce convergence time down to about 3 ms.

	Jean-Marc

On 08/15/2013 12:09 PM, Bob Estes wrote:
> Yes, that's a start.
> 
> Ultimately, though, I'm hoping to reduce the 80ms requirement, and am
> trying to get a handle on what state in the decoder must converge and
> what complications I might be up against.  I'm also only considering
> CELT-based encodings if that simplifies things.
> 
> I know that Opus can do inter-frame energy envelope prediction, but that
> dependency can be eliminated by using intra-frames.
> 
> There's also a dependency introduced by the MDCT overlap of CELT. 
> Without the previous frame, this could be a major term in the
> convergence requirement.
> 
> Other than that, I'm not sure what other dependencies I would need to
> consider.
> 
> Is their a paper or some studies or discussions available about where
> the 80 ms comes from?
> I'm a fairly new member to this group, but did scan the mailing list
> archives for similar topics ...
> 
> Thanks again,
> -Bob Estes
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 5:30 AM, Ralph Giles <giles at thaumas.net
> <mailto:giles at thaumas.net>> wrote:
> 
>     On 13-08-14 10:09 PM, Bob Estes wrote:
> 
>     > I've been studying the Opus code and documentation for a while and
>     have
>     > seen it mentioned several times that Opus uses pre-skip to allow the
>     > codec to converge.  What convergence are they referring to?   Rate
>     > control?  Energy envelope prediction after seeking?
> 
>     Not rate control, but there are a number of predictors running in the
>     decoder which need some amount of data to converge with their expected
>     values when the encoder and decoder would be out of sync for whatever
>     reason.
> 
>     Pre-skip can be used by a muxer to describe how much data must be run
>     through the decoder before valid output is obtained at the start of a
>     file. This could be e.g. 80 ms if the muxer is creating a file from the
>     middle of another one (lossless editing, webrtc stream recording).
> 
>     More commonly it's used to account for resampler and algorithmic delay
>     so the output can be phase-aligned with the input.
> 
>     > Also, I'm also interested in the seeking behaviour of the decoder.
>     > If, say, I want to skip ahead in an Opus bitstream, can I start
>     decoding
>     > at any intra frame without artifacts?
> 
>     You must start feeding data to the decoder about 80 ms before the
>     intended seek point, and discard the output. This is for convergence as
>     described above, but for seeking you can use the general 80 ms rule as
>     described in the Ogg Opus draft. This is referred to as pre-roll, and
>     doesn't need to be specially specified by the muxer like pre-skip since
>     it's constant and applies to any seek point, not just the start of
>     playback.
> 
>     Does that help?
> 
>      -r
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> opus mailing list
> opus at xiph.org
> http://lists.xiph.org/mailman/listinfo/opus
>