[XviD-devel] a question... is xvid streamable?

[Christoph Lampert]

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, SuperMMX wrote:
>      I'm not sure about the XviD specific decoding , but in general,
> as long as the basic bitstream configurations, such as VOL header, etc,
> are not lost, partial stream should be playable, cause every VOP
> startcode can be used to resynchronize.
> 
>      In another side, it is not recommended to stream video in this
> direct way , :)

Hi,

if it's just video information that you have, it's simple to find the 
VOL/VOP/VO/VOSH headers in a partial stream, because they are unique 32bit 
sequences that cannot occur anywhere else in the stream. 
Then, you can adapt xvid_decraw.c or any other decode to just discards 
bytes until you hit a header. 
I guess, mplayer/libavcodec in Linux already does it that way, it works 
quite well to play broken streams. 

If there's audio, or AVI header parts or something else, those sequences
might be preset somewhere else, and this method might crash.

gruel