> still may contain relevant or interesting contents which would be ignored.
I am worried about this, too, and wonder if it doesn't make sense (and if there 
isn't a technical reason) to take Ruben's work even a step further and default 
to a large tolerance/threshold, and/or simply "pad" the shorter track(s) with 
silence/blank screen in order to equal the length of the longest track. (Maybe 
not a great model, but this was the way QuickTime Player worked for adding 
tracks together, i.e. in parallel, and it always felt okay to me.) I'd include 
a warning, too, about the difference in track content lengths. I think this is 
better than what would effectively be deleting content if MP is truncated to 
length of shortest track.

Judy

On May 2, 2012, at 5:13 AM, Rubén Pérez wrote:

> Hi Tobias,
> 
> I'm aware that the track length is never *exactly* the same, mostly because 
> Gstreamer does not stop the pipeline elements synchronously, but that 
> differences are minimal and shouldn't affect the correct behavior of the 
> composer. Still, we have seen issues when the trim point is set at the end 
> (or in the very final part) of the recording, which obviously means that at 
> least one of the tracks was significantly shorter than the others, but the 
> inspection service didn't complain about that. 
> 
> You mention the inspection service should detect tracks are different in 
> length, but then you ask about a reasonable threshold (or "tolerance", as I 
> called it) in those length differences. This makes me wonder about the 
> mechanism the inspection service uses to tell when tracks have the same 
> length or not, and some threshold is already assumed when checking that. For 
> the record, I ingested (using the upload UI) two tracks from different 
> recordings which were more than 10 minutes different in length, in our 1.2 
> installation, and the inspection didn't fail. 
> 
> I'm not sure if making the mediapackage's duration being that of the shortest 
> track makes sense, because it implicitly discards the last part of the tracks 
> longer than that duration, but that still may contain relevant or interesting 
> contents which would be ignored. Besides, I believe we shouldn't be strict in 
> the inspection part, because that way the videos can make it to the trimming 
> operations, where that differences can be solved. If more editing operations 
> are added in the future, incorrect videos should be allowed to go through, so 
> that they can be fixed using the tools available. 
> 
> What I have done locally, and I'm willing to commit to the trunk if it seems 
> reasonable, is adding a new parameter to the trimming operation. I called it 
> "duration-tolerance", but perhaps something with the word "threshold" would 
> be more understandable. The parameter indicates a length in milliseconds, 
> which represents how shorter than the trimming point a certain track can be, 
> without making the operation fail. Specifically, for each track, it may occur 
> that:
> The trimming point is within the track length: The operation works as 
> expected.
> The trimming point is *beyond* the track length:
> If a tolerance (threshold) hasn't been specified, the operation fails.
> If a tolerance (threshold) is specified, then:
> If the difference between the track duration and the trimming point is less 
> than the tolerance, then the track is trimmed at its end instead. So, it 
> remains shorter than the other tracks, but the difference is considered 
> acceptable. 
> If the difference between the track duration and the trimming point is 
> greater than the tolerance, then the operation fails. 
> 
> On a more theoretical aspect, if we allow for tracks of different lengths to 
> coexist in the same MP, the MP's "duration" parameter loses a part of its 
> meaning. This can be clearly seen in the trim operation handler, which checks 
> that the trim "out" point is within the MediaPackage duration, but it may 
> still fail afterwards, when the composer tries to trim a track at the point 
> X, but the track is shorter than X. 
> 
> 2012/5/1 Tobias Wunden <[email protected]>
> Hi Ruben,
> 
> > I just created http://opencast.jira.com/browse/MH-8783 and I would like to 
> > know if people is observing the same issues as ourselves here in our 
> > installation.
> 
> up until now, service implementations are expecting tracks to be of equal 
> length. There used to be a check in the inspection service that would reject 
> mediapackages that contained tracks of varying lengths. However, what do you 
> do if tracks differ by miliseconds? Or in other words, what's a reasonable 
> threshold?
> 
> That being said, it would probably make sense to change the current behavior 
> of the mediapackage's duration to be that of the shortest track. If we are 
> going to allow tracks of differing lengths, some of the services will need to 
> be reworked beforehand.
> 
> Tobias
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