NOTE: DOCS/OUTDATED-tech/* may contain more detailed information, but most of it is possibly or definitely outdated. This file intends to give a big picture of how mplayer/mpv is structured. core/mplayer.c: This contains the main play loop, anything related to mplayer and playback related initializations. It also contains the main function. Generally, it accesses all other subsystems, initializes them, and pushes data between them during playback. The structure is as follows (as of commit e13c05366557cb): * main(): * basic initializations (e.g. init_libav() and more) * pre-parse command line (verbosity level, config file locations) * load config files (parse_cfgfiles()) * parse command line, add files from the command line to playlist (m_config_parse_mp_command_line()) * check help options etc. (call handle_help_options()), possibly exit * call play_files() function that works down the playlist: * run idle loop (idle_loop()), until there are files in the playlist or an exit command was given (slave mode only) * actually load and play a file in play_current_file(): * run all the dozens of functions to load the file and initialize playback * run a small loop that does normal playback, until the file is done or a slave command terminates playback (on each iteration, run_playloop() is called, which is rather big and complicated - it decodes some audio and video on each frame, waits for input, etc.) * uninitialize playback * determine next entry on the playlist to play * loop, or exit if no next file or quit is requested (see enum stop_play_reason) * call exit_player_with_rc() Things worth saying about the playback core: - the currently played tracks are in sh_video and sh_audio - the timeline stuff is used only with MKV ordered chapters (and some other minor features: cue, edl) - most state is in MPContext (mp_core.h), which is not available to the subsystems - the other subsystems rarely call back into the frontend, and the frontend polls them instead (probably a good thing) I like to call mplayer.c (and some other files) the "frontend". talloc.h & talloc.c: Hierarchical memory manager copied from Samba. It's like a malloc() with more features. Most importantly, each talloc allocation can have a parent, and if the parent is free'd, all children will be free'd as well. The parent is an arbitrary talloc allocation. It's either set by the allocation call by passing a talloc parent, usually as first argument to the allocation function. It can also be set or reset later by other calls (at least talloc_steal()). A talloc allocation that is used as parent is often called a talloc context. Lots of code still uses malloc() proper, and you should be careful what type of allocation you're dealing with when returning or free'ing an allocation. (Needless to say, talloc_free() and free() are completely different things.) The copy in mplayer has been modified to abort on OOM conditions. An allocation call will never return NULL. One very useful feature of talloc is fast tracking of memory leaks. ("Fast" as in it doesn't require valgrind.) You can enable it by passing the option --leak-report as first parameter, or better, setting the MPV_LEAK_REPORT environment variable to "1": export MPV_LEAK_REPORT=1 This will list all unfree'd allocations on exit. Documentation can be found here: http://git.samba.org/?p=samba.git;a=blob;f=lib/talloc/talloc.h;hb=HEAD core/mp_core.h: Data structures for mplayer.c and command.c. They are usually not accessed by other parts of mplayer for the sake of modularization. Note that there are lots of global variables floating around everywhere else. This is an ongoing transition, and eventually there should be no global variables anymore. options.h contains the global option struct MPOpts, and its default values are in defaultopts.c for some reason. core/input/input.c: This translates keyboard input comming from libvo and other sources (such as remote control devices like Apple IR or slave mode commands) to the key bindings listed in the user's (or the builtin) input.conf and turns them into items of type struct mp_cmd. These commands are queued, and read by mplayer.c. They get pushed with run_command() to command.c. Note that keyboard input and slave mode input are essentially the same things. Just looking at input.conf should make this clear. (The other direction of slave mode communication, mplayer to application, consists of random mp_msg() calls all over the code in all parts of the player.) core/command.c: This contains the implementation for slave commands and properties. Properties are essentially dynamic variables changed by certain commands. This is basically responsible for all user commands, like initiating seeking, switching tracks, etc. It calls into mplayer.c, where most of the work is done, but also into other parts of mplayer. core/mp_msg.h: All terminal output should go though mp_msg(). stream/*: File input is implemented here. stream.h/.c provides a simple stream based interface (like reading a number of bytes at a given offset). mplayer can also play from http streams and such, which is implemented here. E.g. if mplayer sees "http://something" on the command line, it will pick stream_http.c based on the prefix, and pass the rest of the filename to it. Some stream inputs are quite special: stream_dvd.c turns DVDs into mpeg streams (DVDs are actually a bunch of vob files etc. on a filesystem), stream_tv.c provides TV input including channel switching. Some stream inputs are just there to invoke special demuxers, like stream_mf.c. (Basically to make the prefix "mf://" do something special.) cache2.c is a horrible little thing which provides a caching wrapper around stream implementations, needed for smooth network playback. demux/: Demuxers split data streams into audio/video/sub streams, which in turn yield packets. Packets (see demux_packet.h) are mostly byte chunks tagged with a playback time (PTS). These packets are passed to the decoders. Most demuxers have been removed from this fork, and the only important and "actual" demuxers left are demux_mkv.c and demux_lavf.c (uses libavformat). There are some pseudo demuxers like demux_cue.c, which exist only to invoke other frontend code (tl_cue.c in this case). The main interface is in demux.h. A demuxer provides a list of available streams. Also, for each type of stream (video/audio/sub) there is a demux_stream. This contains the current packet stream coming from the demuxer as a linked list of demux_packets. video/: This contains several things related to audio/video encoding, as well as video filters. mp_image.h and img_format.h define how mplayer stores video frames internally. video/decode/: vd_*.c are video decoders. (There's only vd_ffmpeg.c left.) dec_video.c/vd.c handle most of connecting the frontend with the actual decoder. video/filter/: vf_*.c and vf.c form the video filter chain. They are fed by the video decoder, and output the filtered images to the VOs though vf_vo.c. By default, no video filters (except vf_vo) are used. video/out/: Video output. They also create GUI windows and handle user input. In most cases, the windowing code is shared among VOs, like x11_common.c for X11 and w32_common.c for Windows. The VOs stand between frontend and windowing code. vo_opengl can pick a windowing system at runtime, e.g. the same binary can provide both X11 and Cocoa support on OSX. VOs can be reconfigured at runtime. A config() call can change the video resolution and format, without destroying the window. vo_vdpau and vo_opengl should be taken as reference. audio/: format.h/format.c define the audio formats. audio/decode/: ad_*.c and dec_audio.c/ad.c handle audio decoding. audio/filter/: Audio filter chain. audio/out/: Audio outputs. Unlike VOs, AOs can't be reconfigured on a format change. Without --gapless-audio, even playing a new file will close and re-open the audio device. Note that mplayer synchronizes the video to the audio. That's the reason why buggy audio drivers can have a bad influence on playback quality. sub/: A big mess. Contains subtitle rendering (parts of it), OSD rendering, subtitle loading. There are about 3 types of subtitles: image subs, ASS subs, text subs. Also, there are 3 rendering methods: image subs, libass, internal subtitle renderer. Also, subtitles can come from demuxers or external files. All the possible combinations create weird special cases, e.g. taking a text subtitle event from the demuxer and converting it to ass for display is different from loading a text subtitle and converting it to ass. core/timeline/: A timeline is the abstraction used by mplayer.c to combine several files into one seemingly linear video. It's mainly used for ordered chapters playback. The high level code to find and load other files containing the segments for playing an ordered chapters file is in tl_matroska.c. etc/: The files codecs.conf and input.conf are actually integrated into the mplayer binary by the build system. These files define the default settings. codecs.conf maps video/audio formats to decoders. input.conf contains the default keybindings.