Tag: gstreamer

During all these years using GStreamer, I’ve been having to deal with GstSegments in many situations. I’ve always have had an intuitive understanding of the meaning of each field, but never had the time to properly write a good reference explanation for myself, ready to be checked at those times when the task at hand stops being so intuitive and nuisances start being important. I used the notes I took during an interesting conversation with Alba and Alicia about those nuisances, during the GStreamer Hackfest in A Coruña, as the seed that evolved into this post.

But what are actually GstSegments? They are the structures that track the values needed to synchronize the playback of a region of interest in a media file.

GstSegments are used to coordinate the translation between Presentation Timestamps (PTS), supplied by the media, and Runtime.

PTS is the timestamp that specifies, in buffer time, when the frame must be displayed on screen. This buffer time concept (called buffer running-time in the docs) refers to the ideal time flow where rate isn’t being had into account.

Decode Timestamp (DTS) is the timestamp that specifies, in buffer time, when the frame must be supplied to the decoder. On decoders supporting P-frames (forward-predicted) and B-frames (bi-directionally predicted), the PTS of the frames reaching the decoder may not be monotonic, but the PTS of the frames reaching the sinks are (the decoder outputs monotonic PTSs).

Runtime (called clock running time in the docs) is the amount of physical time that the pipeline has been playing back. More specifically, the Runtime of a specific frame indicates the physical time that has passed or must pass until that frame is displayed on screen. It starts from zero.

Base time is the point when the Runtime starts with respect to the input timestamp in buffer time (PTS or DTS). It’s the Runtime of the PTS=0.

Start, stop, duration: Those fields are buffer timestamps that specify when the piece of media that is going to be played starts, stops and how long that portion of the media is (the absolute difference between start and stop, and I mean absolute because a segment being played backwards may have a higher start buffer timestamp than what its stop buffer timestamp is).

Position is like the Runtime, but in buffer time. This means that in a video being played back at 2x, Runtime would flow at 1x (it’s physical time after all, and reality goes at 1x pace) and Position would flow at 2x (the video moves twice as fast than physical time).

The Stream Time is the position in the stream. Not exactly the same concept as buffer time. When handling multiple streams, some of them can be offset with respect to each other, not starting to be played from the begining, or even can have loops (eg: repeating the same sound clip from PTS=100 until PTS=200 intefinitely). In this case of repeating, the Stream time would flow from PTS=100 to PTS=200 and then go back again to the start position of the sound clip (PTS=100). There’s a nice graphic in the docs illustrating this, so I won’t repeat it here.

Time is the base of Stream Time. It’s the Stream time of the PTS of the first frame being played. In our previous example of the repeating sound clip, it would be 100.

There are also concepts such as Rate and Applied Rate, but we didn’t get into them during the discussion that motivated this post.

So, for translating between Buffer Time (PTS, DTS) and Runtime, we would apply this formula:

Runtime = BufferTime * ( Rate * AppliedRate ) + BaseTime

And for translating between Buffer Time (PTS, DTS) and Stream Time, we would apply this other formula:

StreamTime = BufferTime * AppliedRate + Time

And that’s it. I hope these notes in the shape of a post serve me as reference in the future. Again, thanks to Alicia, and especially to Alba, for the valuable clarifications during the discussion we had that day in the Igalia office. This post wouldn’t have been possible without them.