This flag forced the decoder to wait for the previous frame to be
consumed by the display.
It was initially implemented as a compilation flag for testing, not
intended to be exposed at runtime. But to remove ifdefs and to allow
users to test this flag easily, it had finally been exposed by commit
ebccb9f6cc.
In practice, it turned out to be useless: it had no practical impact,
and it did not solve or mitigate any performance issues causing frame
skipping.
But that added some complexity to the codebase: it required an
additional condition variable, and made video buffer calls possibly
blocking, which in turn required code to interrupt it on exit.
To prepare support for multiple sinks plugged to the decoder (display
and v4l2 for example), the blocking call used for pacing the decoder
output becomes unacceptable, so just remove this useless "feature".
To packetize the H.264 raw stream, av_parser_parse2() (called by
av_read_frame()) knows that it has received a full frame only after it
has received some data for the next frame. As a consequence, the client
always waited until the next frame before sending the current frame to
the decoder!
On the device side, we know packets boundaries. To reduce latency,
make the device always transmit the "frame meta" to packetize the stream
manually (it was already implemented to send PTS, but only enabled on
recording).
On the client side, replace av_read_frame() by manual packetizing and
parsing.
<https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50682518/replacing-av-read-frame-to-reduce-delay>
<https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/3354>
Limit source code to 80 chars, and declare functions return type and
modifiers on a separate line.
This allows to avoid very long lines, and all function names are
aligned.
(We do this on VLC, and I like it.)
The decoder initially read from the socket, decoded the video and sent
the decoded frames to the screen:
+---------+ +----------+
socket ---> | decoder | ---> | screen |
+---------+ +----------+
The design was simple, but the decoder had several responsabilities.
Then we added the recording feature, so we added a recorder, which
reused the packets received from the socket managed by the decoder:
+----------+
---> | screen |
+---------+ / +----------+
socket ---> | decoder | ----
+---------+ \ +----------+
---> | recorder |
+----------+
This lack of separation of concerns now have concrete implications: we
could not (properly) disable the decoder/display to only record the
video.
Therefore, split the decoder to extract the stream:
+----------+ +----------+
---> | decoder | ---> | screen |
+---------+ / +----------+ +----------+
socket ---> | stream | ----
+---------+ \ +----------+
---> | recorder |
+----------+
This will allow to record the stream without decoding the video.
