#10045 HIGH 1.5-sof: XO-1.5 Record audio/video are out of sync with each other

[Richard A. Smith]

On 05/13/2010 08:07 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
> On 05/13/2010 03:26 AM, James Cameron wrote:
>> We discussed this briefly in team meeting this morning ... Record is
>> writing an uncompressed stream to SD, before then compressing it in the
>> "Save" step once the video recording is stopped.  (I could be wrong).
>>
>> This means that no matter what the size of the buffer memory, if the
>> data rate from the camera exceeds the rate at which we can write to SD,
>> there will be skips once a recording is long enough to fill the buffer.
> ...
>> So we determine the data rate by choosing height, width, and frame rate
>> from the camera.  We determine the maximum rate according to the choice
>> of SD media.
>
> If I understand correctly, Record does compress the video on the fly.
> It's the audio that it writes uncompressed to disk for later compression
> and muxing.  I don't know at what quality it performs audio recording, but
> it might be as low as 32 KB/s uncompressed.

I highly doubt that record is sending raw video to the SD device.  If it 
is then its broken and no wonder its skipping.  Raw 640x480 RGB at 30 
frames a second is 27MiB/s.  Even if you use a YUV format with 
16bits/pixel and 15 frames a second its still 9MiB/s which exceeds the 
sustained write rate of a class 6 card.  We ship class 2 (2MiB/s).

If we can't do theora on the fly then we should be doing MJPEG or 
HuffYUV (if you wanted a lossless format).  Although HuffYUV is still 
going to be much faster than a Class 2 card.  Even MJPEG (roughly /10) 
is still pushing it.

-- 
Richard A. Smith  <richard at laptop.org>
One Laptop per Child