can VCHI frame timestamp values be made opaque? (not usec)

Open
#1,883 14 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
linux

Research direction

Start by tracing the bcm2835-codec timestamp path through MMAL/VCHI and reviewing the linked linux-media discussion. Determine whether firmware interprets the timestamp as microseconds; done means either establishing that it can remain opaque or identifying the required separate field if microsecond values are needed.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

While upstreaming bcm2835-codec, Nicolas Dufresne noted that the timestamp in v4l2 is not necessarily an actual time value (in nsec). In fact, GStreamer actually uses a frame counter for this field. (see https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/20240303152635.2762696-1-maarten@rmail.be/T/#m4521f17f9e75074ff3993df4a23c146c26f6e2a6 )

I don't know how the firmware handle the mmal(VCHI?) timestamp values, does it actually calculate something with these timestamps?

If it doesn't, it might be easy enough to get a fix in the firmware to not "interprete" these timestamp values, which would make the mmal code a lot simpler and could avoid potential issues (eg: GStreamer)

The code does state in comment that the mmal timestamps are usec, so if it does need usec timestamps and it needs this for a specific calculation, maybe we can add an extra field?

Dominant language
No language data
Stars
5.6k
Forks
1.7k
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from raspberrypi/firmware

All issues in raspberrypi/firmware

Similar issues

More Embedded & IoT issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.