[smpeg] audio/video sync in SMPEG

[Ryan C. Gordon]

> That is, there is NO LINK BETWEEN THE MPEG TIMESTAMPS AND THE SDL
> SYNCHRONISATION !!! (XXXX)

Yep.

This is an SDL limitation; you can't timestamp audio. You really have 
very little control over SDL audio latency. This is due to various 
platform limitations (not the least of which being Linux's /dev/dsp).

In practice, we don't generally lose sync, though.

> One thing that has bugged me is the  SDL_Audiospec->samples member.
> How is this computed ?  XXXX

Magic, mostly. The goal is to make that number as low as possible (the 
lower the number, the less latency) without making it too low (in which 
case you'll get audio corruption, skips, etc). There isn't a magic 
number that guaranteed to work on all platforms and all hardware.

> - synchronisation means a wait (the assumption being that
>  the incoming data rate is much faster than the rate at
>  which the driver is outputting) XXXX

Generally, this holds true. SMPEG was meant to read from hard disk, 
not, say, a network stream, and comes from a time when your video 
hardware didn't necessary have YUV overlays and thus might be 
converting to RGB on the fly.

> - The strength of smpeg compared to other (open source) mpeg
> decoders  seems to be that smpeg is arch. neutral while
> others seem to be optimised for i386

Pretty much. SMPEG is far from perfect for many of the reasons you 
listed.

--ryan.