Kostya's Boring Codec World

And now let’s talk about probably the hairiest part of multimedia framework — input-output layer.

Current libavformat design looks too messy to me and thus my design will be different. I know that some Lucas prefer the old way but I’d rather split protocol handling into several layers.

First, there’s base I/O handler used solely for I/O operations. NAIOHandler contains functions for reading data, reading data asynchronously, writing data, seeking and ioctl() for some I/O-specific operations. There will be very few I/O handlers — just file, network (TCP/UDP) and null.

On top of that there’s protocol handler. Protocol handler employs I/O handler to perform I/O operations and provides only reading, writing, seeking and flushing functions. There may be buffered and unbuffered wrappers over I/O handler or something less trivial like HTTP handler.

On top of that there may be a layer or several of other protocol handlers if they need to relate to other protocols (i.e. Some-Streaming-Protocol-over-HTTP).

And on the very top there are I/O functions using protocol handlers for reading and writing data (bytes, X-bit integers, buffers). Those are used by (de)muxers.

That’s the plan, insert usual rant about lack of time, interest and such here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2015 at 12:34 pm and is filed under NihAV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.