[mythtv] 0.21 and ffmpeg handling of corrupt ac3

[Tom Dexter]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 5:31 PM, Tom Dexter <digitalaudiorock at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey folks...before I continue, as someone who just recently upgraded
>  to 0.21 under Gentoo, let me just extend a huge thank you for all the
>  work you do.  0.21 simply rocks.
>
>  Several of us on the users mailing list noticed that, after the 0.21
>  upgrade, the audio of recorded DVB broadcasts didn't appear to be
>  handling corrupt ac3 as gracefully as it used to.  Some degree of
>  corruption, especially with OTA recording is almost inevitable.
>
>  What we found was that in 0.20.2 the tendency when mythtv encountered
>  corruption in a DVB transport stream, more often than not, was for the
>  audio to drop out (brief silence) if anything.  However in 0.21, any
>  file corruption seemed to almost invariably cause full scale digital
>  chirps...the kind that can knock you out of your seat if you're
>  listening at any volume.  Here's the archive of the thread on -users:
>
>   http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/329267
>
>  I could see that between 0.20-fixes and 0.21-fixes,
>  libavcodec/ac3dec.c had obviously been totally re-written by the
>  ffmpeg devs.  After some poking around I discovered that newer
>  versions of ffmpeg have had crc error checking added to
>  libavcodec/ac3dec.c for this reason.  The original discussion on
>  ffmpeg-devel, as well as the original proposed patch starts here:
>
>  http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2007-September/034883.html
>
>  That thread seems to have a very heated debate about it for some
>  reason, but in any case it looks like newer versions do in fact have
>  error checking.  For my own purposes, I hacked together a modified
>  version of the original patch posted at the above link.  For
>  simplicity I made the check unconditional (regardless of
>  avctx->error_resilience).  That patch (designed for SVN 16944) looks
>  like this:
>
>  Index: libavcodec/ac3dec.c
>  ===================================================================
>  --- libs/libavcodec/ac3dec.c
>  +++ libs/libavcodec/ac3dec.c
>  @@ -37,6 +37,7 @@
>   #include "bitstream.h"
>   #include "dsputil.h"
>   #include "random.h"
>  +#include "crc.h"
>
>   /**
>   * Table of bin locations for rematrixing bands
>  @@ -1121,6 +1122,12 @@
>          return -1;
>      }
>
>  +    if (av_crc(av_crc8005, 0, buf + 2, buf_size - 2)) {
>  +        av_log(avctx, AV_LOG_ERROR, "CRC error\n");
>  +        *data_size = 0;
>  +        return buf_size;
>  +    }
>  +
>      avctx->sample_rate = ctx->sampling_rate;
>      avctx->bit_rate = ctx->bit_rate;
>
>  I had a recording that I had saved for testing with corrupt audio in a
>  known spot.  Without the patch I'd get this in my frontend logs:
>
>  2008-04-15 20:11:34.573 [ac3 @ 0xb73e3028]delta bit allocation strategy reserved
>  2008-04-15 20:11:34.573 [ac3 @ 0xb73e3028]error parsing the audio block
>
>  ...along with absolutely awful chirps.  After applying the above patch
>  the same spot in the recording causes this in the frontend logs:
>
>  2008-04-16 16:31:19.787 [ac3 @ 0xb73e7028]CRC error
>  2008-04-16 16:31:20.535 [ac3 @ 0xb73e7028]CRC error
>  2008-04-16 16:31:20.706 [ac3 @ 0xb73e7028]CRC error
>
>  ...along with no more than slight audio dropouts...big big improvement.
>
>  I'm not sure what the ideal way to implement this would be, but I
>  think many DVB users (especially us OTA users) would love to have this
>  one addressed.  I haven't logged any bug as yet.
>
>  Thanks again!
>
>  Tom
>

It occurred to me that, if at any point mythtv uses a newer version of
ffmpeg, this issue will pretty much fix itself.  In any case, if
anyone thinks I should log a bug, and maybe post my patch for anyone
looking for a quick fix, let me know.  I already posted it to the
users list.

Tom