demux: hack for instant stream switching

This removes the delay when switching audio tracks in mkv or mp4 files.
Other formats are not enabled, because it's not clear whether the
demuxers fulfill the requirements listed in demux.h. (Many formats
definitely do not with libavformat.)

Background:

The demuxer packet cache buffers a certain amount of packets. This
includes only packets from selected streams. We discard packets from
other streams for various reasons. This introduces a problem: switching
to a different audio track introduces a delay. The delay is as big as
the demuxer packet cache buffer, because while the file was read ahead
to fill the packet buffer, the process of reading packets also discarded
all packets from the previously not selected audio stream. Once the
remaining packet buffer has been played, new audio packets are available
and you hear audio again.

We could probably just not discard packets from unselected streams. But
this would require additional memory and CPU resources, and also it's
hard to tell when packets from unused streams should be discarded (we
don't want to keep them forever; it'd be a memory leak).

We could also issue a player hr-seek to the current playback position,
which would solve the problem in 1 line of code or so. But this can be
rather slow.

So what we do in this commit instead is: we just seek back to the
position where our current packet buffer starts, and start demuxing from
this position again. This way we can get the "past" packets for the
newly selected stream. For streams which were already selected the
packets are simply discarded until the previous position is reached
again.

That latter part is the hard part. We really want to skip packets
exactly until the position where we left off previously, or we will skip
packets or feed packets to the decoder twice. If we assume that the
demuxer is deterministic (returns exactly the same packets after a seek
to a previous position), then we can try to check whether it's the same
packet as the one at the end of the packet buffer. If it is, we know
that the packet after it is where we left off last time.

Unfortunately, this is not very robust, and maybe it can't be made
robust. Currently we use the demux_packet.pos field as unique packet
ID - which works fine in some scenarios, but will break in arbitrary
ways if the basic requirement to the demuxer (as listed in the demux.h
additions) are broken. Thus, this is enabled only for the internal mkv
demuxer and the libavformat mp4 demuxer.

(libavformat mkv does not work, because the packet positions are not
unique. Probably could be fixed upstream, but it's not clear whether
it's a bug or a feature.)

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/player/loadfile.c b/player/loadfile.c
index d9d6a0036c..472304d5f0 100644
--- a/player/loadfile.c
+++ b/player/loadfile.c
@@ -548,6 +548,9 @@ void mp_switch_track_n(struct MPContext *mpctx, int order, enum stream_type type
     if (current)
         current->selected = false;
 
+    if (track && track->demuxer == mpctx->demuxer)
+        demux_set_enable_refresh_seeks(mpctx->demuxer, true);
+
     reselect_demux_streams(mpctx);
 
     mpctx->current_track[order][type] = track;
@@ -557,6 +560,8 @@ void mp_switch_track_n(struct MPContext *mpctx, int order, enum stream_type type
 
     reselect_demux_streams(mpctx);
 
+    demux_set_enable_refresh_seeks(mpctx->demuxer, false);
+
     if (type == STREAM_VIDEO && order == 0) {
         reinit_video_chain(mpctx);
     } else if (type == STREAM_AUDIO && order == 0) {