Video Player

So this weekend I wrote a video player using jjmpeg. Yesterday I had the basic video working, and today I got sound working - using OpenAL (JOAL) for output. For the most part even using a fairly simple synchronisation mechanism it works fairly well. I'm letting the hardware run the sound at it's native rate, and synchronising the video to the timestamps in the file (using Thread.sleep() no less!) - not perfect but it's a start.

I also uploaded a new jjmpegdemo's directory to the jjmpeg project which includes a simple audio player that I used to work out OpenAL.

But the Video player is a bit more complex, I've currently got 1 thread demuxing the input, 1 thread each for video or audio stream decoding, and another thread to synchronise the audio and video. I use some of the nice classes from java.util.concurrent to handle the packet and frame queues which means each bit of code is pretty simple. I'm recycling the AVPacket's, the frames and audio sample buffers so once started it has a pretty low GC load.

I'm having some strange problems though - certain files seem to throw the demuxer right out - I get massive corruption in video and audio and it's getting completely broken data frames. These files play just fine in the AudioPlayer above, so I presume i'm doing something incorrect with my threading which is corrupting something along the way. Other files work just fine though so it doesn't seem to be just a simple problem with invalid code - it also affects different containers and codecs inconsistently. Just the sort of bugs I like ...

Update It seems I had too many threads. I've moved calling the codecs from their own thread to the demux thread. Then I have 2 threads for rendering the audio and video separately instead.