Video decoding/rendering pipeline starup delay

brainmeltdown — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 23:31:53 GMT

I'm using the imx gstreamer imxvpudec plugin in the context of a video over IP phone. The pipeline it uses to decode and render H.264 video received from the network is written in C but essentially is

appsrc ! h264parse ! imxvpudec ! imxipuvideotransform ! imxg2dvideosink.

The code is running on a Boundary Devices BD-SL-I.MX6 which I gather was originally called Sabre Lite and was the original i.MX6 reference design board. The video display device is an HDMI monitor at /dev/video1. The input is from appsrc because packets are coming in via a non-Gstreamer RTP stack.

I have log messages when the code sets the pipeline state to PLAY and log messages for pipeline bus events. It seems that from setting the pipeline to PLAY until the state changes from PAUSED to PLAYING takes only about 1 second which is acceptable. But decoded video is not rendered on the HDMI display for nearly 4 seconds from start of receiving packets.

Where might such a long delay most likely arise? Once the video starts rendering the latency is not too terrible. I would estimate it at less than 500 ms.

Re: Video decoding/rendering pipeline starup delay

art — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 09:53:46 GMT

The most likely cause of the delay you observe is the fact that the stream decoding can be started only on an I-frame (initial frame), that may appear relatively rare (e.g. once a some seconds) within a stream. The frequency of I-frames appearance depends on the video source side and cannot be improved on the receiving side in any way.

Have a great day,
Artur

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Video decoding/rendering pipeline starup delay

Re: Video decoding/rendering pipeline starup delay