Gmerlin configuration improvements

Up to now, gmerlins configuration philosophy was simple: Export all user settable parameters as possible to the frontends, no matter now important they are. There are 2 reasons for that:

• As a developer, I don't like to decide which configuration options are important.
  
• As a user I (personally) want to have full control over all program-and plugin settings. Nothing annoys me more in other applications than features, which could easily achieved by the backend, but they are not supported in the frontend.
  

The downside of this approach is simple: For an average user, the gmerlin applications are way too complicated. And of course, for me it's also annoying to tweak that many parameters all the time. Now, since I reach a one-zero version, It's time to look at such usability issues.

A little look behind the GUI
A configuration dialog can contain of multiple nested sections. If you have more than one section, you see a tree structure on the right, which lets you select the section. A section contains all the configuration widgets you can see at the same time. Therefore the code must always distinguish if an action is for a section or for the whole dialog.

Factory defaults
Most configuration sections now have a button Restore factory defaults. It does, what the name suggests. You can use this if you think you messed something up.

Presets
Some configuration sections support presets. You can save all parameters into a file and load them again after. In some situations, presets are per section. In this case you see the preset menu below the parameter widgets. If the presets are global for the whole dialog window, you see the menu below the tree view. The next image shows a single-section dialog with the preset menu next to the restore button.



The next image shows a dialog with multiple sections. The preset menu is for the whole dialog, the restore button is for the section only.



The presets are designed such, that multiple applications can share them. E.g. an encoding setup configured in the transcoder can be reused in the recorder etc. Presets are available for:

• All plugins (always global for the whole plugin)
  
• Whole encoding setups
  
• Filter chains
  

There is no reason, not to support presets for other configurations as well. Suggestions are welcome.

Gmerlin prereleases

gmerlin prereleases can be downloaded here:

http://gmerlin.sourceforge.net/gmerlin-dependencies-20100803.tar.bz2

http://gmerlin.sourceforge.net/gmerlin-all-in-one-20100803.tar.bz2

Highlights of this development iteration:

• Pass-through of compressed streams in the transcoder
  
• Native matroska demuxer with sample accurate seeking in webm files
  
• VP8 decoding via ffmpeg
  
• Lots of work on precise timing and sample accurate seeking
  
• Presets in the GUI configuration (will blog later about that)
  
• The gmerlin package reaches version one-zero
  

Please test this as much as possible and report any problems.

Getting serious with sample accuracy

gmerlin-avdecoder has a sample accurate seek API for some time now. What was missing was a test to prove that seeking happens really with sample accuracy.

Test tool
The strictest test if a decoder library can seek with sample accuracy is to seek to a position, decode a video frame or a bunch of audio samples. Compare these with the frame/samples you get if you decode the file from the beginning. Of course, the timestamps must also be identical. A tool, which does this, is in tests/seektest.c. I noticed, that video streams easily pass this test, usually even if no sample accurate access was requested. That's probably because I thought, that video streams are more difficult. So I put more brainload into them. Therefore I'll concentrate on audio streams in this post.

Audio codec details
When seeking in video streams, you have keyframes, which tell you where decoding of a stream can be resumed after a seek. It's sometimes difficult to implement this, but at least you always know what to do.

The naive approach for audio streams is to assume, that all blocks (e.g. 1152 samples for mp3) can be decoded independently. Unfortunately, reality is a bit more cruel:

Bit reservoir
This is a mechanism, which allows to make pseudo VBR in a CBR stream. If a frame can be encoded with fewer bits than allocated for the frame, it can leave the remaining bits to a subsequent (probably more complex) frame. The downside of this trick is, that after a seek, the next frame might need bits from previous frames to be fully decoded.

Oberlapping transform
Most audio compression techniques work in the frequency-domain, so between the audio signal and the compression stage, there is some kind of fft-like transform.

Now, for reasons beyond this post, overlapping transforms are used by some codecs. This means, that for decoding the first samples of a compressed block, you need the last samples of the previous block. The image below shows one channel of an AAC stream for the case that the overlapping was ignored when seeking. You see that the beginning of the frame is not reconstructed properly, because the previous frame is missing.



Both the bit reservoir and the overlapping can be boiled down to a single number, which tells how many sample before the actual seek point the decoder must restart decoding. This number is set by the codec during initialization, and it's used when we seek with sample accuracy.

Mysterious liba52 behavior
Even if sample accuracy was achieved, the AC3 streams (which are on DVDs or in AVCHD files) don't achieve bit exactness. The image below shows, that there is no time shift between the signals (which means that gmerlin-avdecoder seeks correctly), but the values are not exactly the same.



First I blamed the AC3 dynamic range control for this behavior. Dynamic range compressors always have some kind memory across several frames. But even after disabling DRC, the difference was still there. I would really be curious if that's a principal property of AC3 being non-deterministic or if it's a liba52 bug.

Conclusions
The table below lists all audio codecs, which were taken into consideration. They represent a huge percentage of all files found in the wild. The next important codecs are the uncompressed ones, but these are always sample accurate.

Compression	Library	Overlap	Bit reservoir	Bit exact
MPEG-1, layer II	libmad	-	-	+
MPEG-1, layer III	libmad	+	+	+
AAC	faad2	+	? (assumed -)	+
AC3	liba52	+	? (assumed -)	- (see image above)
Vorbis	libvorbis	+	-	+

Obtaining the information summarized here was a very painful process with web researches and experiments. The documentation of the decoder libraries regarding sample accurate and bit exact seeking is extremely sparse if not non-existing.