[Speex-dev] Random decoder error/exception

[Davide Cecchi]

Hi,

i know this mailing list is basically dead but i try anyways because 
i've got a problem and i'm nearly desperate.

I'm writing a realtime voice chat application, with a centralized server 
(dedicated) architecture, using C# (dedicated server is a .net core app 
while for the client i'm using C# to script the game engine Unity3D).

For the encoding/decoding part i'm using NSpeex, the c# wrapper for 
Unity of the Speex.dll library (https://github.com/aijingsun6/NSpeex)

Basically, it works like this:

- Client records from the microphone/soundcard PCM samples and put them 
in chunks of X samples each.

- These chunks are then passed to the encoder, when one chuck has been 
encoded (async on another thread) a callback is received and the 
compressed <byte>[] is put in a queue for the network

delivery. Each chunk is 554 bytes.

- The dedicated server receives the data and broadcasts to other clients 
(TCP stream).

- The client receives the chunk and makes the opposite: every byte 
received is put in a List<byte> which is the first buffer.

When i've got enough bytes to start decoding (554 bytes), the segment is 
taken and sent to the decoder.

Once it has been decoded, i take the resulting PCM samples and pass them 
to the playing buffer which sends them to the soundcard when i have 
enough data to start playing.

----

Now, it works GOOD! Most of the time...

but from time to time, out of the blue and totally random, the decoder 
(and only the decoder) throws an Exception like: "more than two 
sidebands found" or "invalid sideband mode" and

simply stops working, making my app unable to continue working.

 From my understanding of the Speex library, this means that the decoder 
doesn't find the bits where it expect them to be... but WHY it happens 
only from time to time?!

I've seen it happen when i feed the encoder/decoder with segments of the 
wrong size but in this case i've debugged the hell out of it and i'm 
sure i'm passing always the same data amount.

..could this be a network related problem? I don't think so, i'm using 
reliable TCP and i'm sure every packet reachs the destination and in the 
correct order.


Anybody has an idea?


Thanks in advance,

Davide