Frame tables

When thinking a bit about video editing, I thought it might be nice to have the timestamps of all video frames in advance, i.e. without decoding the whole file. With that you can e.g. seek to the Nth frame or for a given absolute time you can find the closest video frame even for variable framerate files.

The seeking functions always take a (scaled) time as argument and I saw no reason to change that.

So what I needed was a table which allows the translation of framecounts to/from PTS values even for variable framerate files. For many fileformats a similar information is already stored internally (as a file index) so the task was only to convert the info into something usable and export it through the public API.

Since this feature is very generic and might get used in both gmerlin and gmerlin-avdecoder, I decided to put the stuff into gavl.

Implicit table compression
One very smart feature in the Quicktime format is the stts atom. That's because it stores a table of frame_count/frame_duration pairs. The nice thing is, that for constant framerate files (the vast majority) the table consists of just one entry and translating framecounts to/from timestamps becomes trivial. Only for variable framerate streams, the table has more entries and the translation functions need longer.

The implementation
The frame table is called gavl_frame_table_t and is defined in gavl.h. Note: The structure is public at present but might become private before the next public release.
Here, there are also the translation functions gavl_frame_table_frame_to_time(), gavl_frame_table_time_to_frame() and gavl_frame_table_num_frames().

If you use gmerlin-avdecoder for decoding files, you can use bgav_get_frame_table() to obtain a frame table of a video stream. It can be called after the stream has been fully initialized. Naturally you will want to use sample accurate decoding mode before obtaining the frame table. If you want to reuse the frame table after the file was closed, use gavl_frame_table_save() and gavl_frame_table_load().

Future extension
An also interesting information are the timecodes. First of all, what's the difference between timecodes and timestamps in gmerlin terminology? Timestamps are used to synchronize multiple streams (audio, video, subtitles) of a file with each other for playback. They usually start at zero or another small value and play an important role e.g. after seeking in the files. Timecodes are usually given for each video frame and are used to identify scenes in a bunch of footage. They can resemble e.g. recording time/date.

Timecodes will also be supported by the frame table, but this isn't implemented yet.