[MPlayer-dev-eng] Lots of stuff for NUT

[Rich Felker]

On Mon, Jan 09, 2006 at 10:50:34PM +0100, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > Now, I'd really like NUT to be a container where you can quickly extract
> > subtitle stream (at least the text ones), for this and other purposes.
> > Ability to add subtitle stream without remuxing the whole file (which
> > can even lead to problems in rare cases), would also be great, though
> > not that required.
> 
> finally someone who likes the idea of non interleaved NUT files :))

BLEH!!! >_<
hehe

> well, seriously the idea isnt so bad, rich what do you think about
> allowing a very low bitrate "text" subtitle stream to be _repeated_
> once at the end or begin of a file in addition to being interleaved?
> it would solve many issues

What about instead of repeating it, doing this instead:

- All streams are fully interleaved.
- Streams are classified into two types: continuous and discontinuous
- Audio and video are continuous streams, always.
- Subtitles and info frames are (optionally? or always?) discontinuous

Now..

- Continuous streams are fully seekable and have backptr and pts at
  each syncpoint and key flag and pts in the syncpoint index.

- Discontinuous streams do not appear in the syncpoint index but
  instead have their own index of _all_ frames.

- Index for discontinuous streams appears at least at end of file and
  also interleaved as some sort of distributed index.

Admittedly this is somewhat more complex, but it's also much smaller
than duplicating all the subs several times, and could probably be
made to work correctly with non-indexed seek mode. The rationale
behind the whole thing is that 'discontinuous' streams are sparse and
that frames are less common than syncpoints, and that you easily want
to be able to find the next/previous frame in the stream by itself.

Of course maybe all of this is just nonsense and could all be done
within the existing framework. I'm tired and not thinking very well at
the moment but after writing all this i figured might as well send
it.... I like the idea of having the full list of subtitles and info
packets available to you in index, though..

Rich