[vlc-devel] [RFC PATCH 3/3] decoder: cancel the vout on close

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

On Wednesday 18 November 2015 14:32:01 Thomas Guillem wrote:
> This fixes a deadlock if a decoder module is waiting on decoder_GetPicture /
> decoder_NewPicture when it's closing.

I am not aware of any circumstance that would lead to such deadlock.

A decoder, filter or output bug could leak pictures and starve the pool. Or 
the requested pool size could be too small. But that would deadlock much 
earlier than at exit. Also silently ignoring the problem would have 
potentially catastrophic effects on memory usage.

In the past, leaked pictures were assumed to be permanently leaked, and then 
forcefully recycled or destroyed. That worked with libmpeg2. That will not 
work safely with avcodec, or generally with asynchronous or threaded decoding 
though. Decoder plugins need to be fixed or dropped.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/