Commit d0a9af85 authored by Philip Langdale's avatar Philip Langdale

crystalhd: Update high level description

We don't need to document the horrible hacks that we removed.
parent a07c07e7
......@@ -34,39 +34,11 @@
* is not just a function of time, but also one of the dependency on additional
* frames being fed into the decoder to satisfy the b-frame dependencies.
*
* As such, a pipeline will build up that is roughly equivalent to the required
* DPB for the file being played. If that was all it took, things would still
* be simple - so, of course, it isn't.
*
* The hardware has a way of indicating that a picture is ready to be copied out,
* but this is unreliable - and sometimes the attempt will still fail so, based
* on testing, the code will wait until 3 pictures are ready before starting
* to copy out - and this has the effect of extending the pipeline.
*
* Finally, while it is tempting to say that once the decoder starts outputting
* frames, the software should never fail to return a frame from a decode(),
* this is a hard assertion to make, because the stream may switch between
* differently encoded content (number of b-frames, interlacing, etc) which
* might require a longer pipeline than before. If that happened, you could
* deadlock trying to retrieve a frame that can't be decoded without feeding
* in additional packets.
*
* As such, the code will return in the event that a picture cannot be copied
* out, leading to an increase in the length of the pipeline. This in turn,
* means we have to be sensitive to the time it takes to decode a picture;
* We do not want to give up just because the hardware needed a little more
* time to prepare the picture! For this reason, there are delays included
* in the decode() path that ensure that, under normal conditions, the hardware
* will only fail to return a frame if it really needs additional packets to
* complete the decoding.
*
* Finally, to be explicit, we do not want the pipeline to grow without bound
* for two reasons: 1) The hardware can only buffer a finite number of packets,
* and 2) The client application may not be able to cope with arbitrarily long
* delays in the video path relative to the audio path. For example. MPlayer
* can only handle a 20 picture delay (although this is arbitrary, and needs
* to be extended to fully support the CrystalHD where the delay could be up
* to 32 pictures - consider PAFF H.264 content with 16 b-frames).
* As such, the hardware can only be used effectively with a decode API that
* doesn't assume a 1:1 relationship between input packets and output frames.
* The new avcodec decode API is such an API (an m:n API) while the old one is
* 1:1. Consequently, we no longer support the old API, which allows us to avoid
* the vicious hacks that are required to approximate 1:1 operation.
*/
/*****************************************************************************
......
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