[theora-dev] a new proposal

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 04:24:59PM +1100, Michael Smith wrote:

> On Thursday 26 February 2004 16:14, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 11:57:04PM -0500, Monty wrote:
> > > ...sigh.  And the confusion spreads like wildfire.  We already have
> > > perfect sync, Matt.
> >
> > Do you mind explaining briefly?  As of November, it was my understanding
> > that Ogg could only hold media streams with One True Rate which held
> > perfectly forever---no dropped frames, no DSP drift, etc.  Did things
> > change since then, or does the state of the art still deal only with
> > absolutely perfect streams?
> >
> 
> Ogg stamps each page (not quite per-packet, but per-packet stamps can be 
> calculated) with a "granulepos". This has a unique mapping to a time value 
> (which is codec dependent, but that doesn't really matter). 

But it doesn't have an accurate mapping to a time value, and that leads to
the heart of the issue.  granulepos maps to a something like a sample number
or a frame number, right?

> So, given a known codec (e.g. "vorbis, at 44.1kHz"), and any page (pages
> are typically no more than 4 kB - so these granulepos timestamps come
> along pretty often)), you can trivially calculate an exact time offset for
> that data.
> 
> This has always been part of the ogg specification - it hasn't changed.
> Ogg has never had any sync problems.

What if, instead of this hypothetical vorbis stream at 44.1kHz, I am
recording from a PC sound card, so I have one which floats between, say
44000 and 44200.  Or I'm recording video, and every once in a while,
something happens and I drop a frame.  Such is life.  Since the rate isn't
constant for the entire stream, granulepos doesn't let you calculate an
exact time offset.  It'll be off by a small percentage.

This probably doesn't present a significant problem for most Vorbis streams,
which tend to be a few minutes long, and nobody really cares about the exact
time offset anyway because they aren't synched to anything.  But in a video
stream, after, say, an hour or two, that drift adds up to a time
differential which is significant for A/V synchronization.

> Much of the discussion is happening on IRC (irc.freenode.net, #theora),
> and bits of the logs are in cvs to help explain things. If you want full
> logs, ask - someone should be able to send them to you.

I used to


-- 
 - mdz
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