[vlc-devel] [PATCH] HLS: Add flag to start from the beginning of a broadcast, even when in live mode

[Chris Smowton]

Hi,

Here's the last patch in my list of HLS features I need, and which might 
be useful in general. This one is aimed at timeshifting scenarios: when 
a programme is being broadcast live, but nontheless a viewer arriving 
some minutes into the programme wants to start at the beginning, not the 
present moment. This matches with VLC's HLS output filter running with 
--keep-segments, which gradually assembles a VOD feed, which looks 
'live' whilst the broadcast is in progress.

I simply add a flag, --hls-start-beginning, which forces it to start at 
the first available segment regardless of whether the stream is live or 
not. Whilst I'm at it, I clean up ChooseSegment, since it did a bunch of 
pointless work for VOD streams before inevitably returning zero.

The simplest form of this patch broke the download thread, however: this 
was because the DL thread was always greedy when running against a 
"live" stream, with potentially huge memory consumption for this kind of 
stream. It was probably that way because its wait condition was broken: 
it tried to wait for the playlist to get longer if appropriate, but it 
didn't re-check the list length, nor did the list-update thread signal 
it when the list changed. Instead it broke out of its wait loop and 
tried to download again whenever the playback pointer advanced.

I fix this by correcting its wait condition: it now checks the playlist 
length under the correct lock, and uses a semaphore 
("hls_download_t::check_stream") guarded by the download lock to learn 
when it should re-check the playlist length. The playlist update thread 
simply sets this flag whenever it refreshes the list (ideally this would 
be whenever it *changes*). In this way the download thread can obey its 
buffer cap of 6 segments even when dealing with live streams.

Chris
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