This is useful for a combo scrub bar-based UI (#32) + live view UI (#59)
in a non-obvious way. When constructing a HTML Media Source Extensions
API SourceBuffer, the caller can specify a "mode" of either "segments"
or "sequence":
In "sequence" mode, playback assumes segments are added sequentially.
This is good enough for a live view-only UI (#59) but not for a scrub
bar UI in which you may want to seek backward to a segment you've never
seen before. You will then need to insert a segment out-of-sequence.
Imagine what happens when the user goes forward again until the end of
the segment inserted immediately before it. The user should see the
chronologically next segment or a pause for loading if it's unavailable.
The best approximation of this is to track the mapping of timestamps to
segments and insert a VTTCue with an enter/exit handler that seeks to
the right position. But seeking isn't instantaneous; the user will
likely briefly see first the segment they seeked to before. That's
janky. Additionally, the "canplaythrough" event will behave strangely.
In "segments" mode, playback respects the timestamps we set:
* The obvious choice is to use wall clock timestamps. This is fine if
they're known to be fixed and correct. They're not. The
currently-recording segment may be "unanchored", meaning its start
timestamp is not yet fixed. Older timestamps may overlap if the system
clock was stepped between runs. The latter isn't /too/ bad from a user
perspective, though it's confusing as a developer. We probably will
only end up showing the more recent recording for a given
timestamp anyway. But the former is quite annoying. It means we have
to throw away part of the SourceBuffer that we may want to seek back
(causing UI pauses when that happens) or keep our own spare copy of it
(memory bloat). I'd like to avoid the whole mess.
* Another approach is to use timestamps that are guaranteed to be in
the correct order but that may have gaps. In particular, a timestamp
of (recording_id * max_recording_duration) + time_within_recording.
But again seeking isn't instantaneous. In my experiments, there's a
visible pause between segments that drives me nuts.
* Finally, the approach that led me to this schema change. Use
timestamps that place each segment after the one before, possibly with
an intentional gap between runs (to force a wait where we have an
actual gap). This should make the browser's natural playback behavior
work properly: it never goes to an incorrect place, and it only waits
when/if we want it to. We have to maintain a mapping between its
timestamps and segment ids but that's doable.
This commit is only the schema change; the new data aren't exposed in
the API yet, much less used by a UI.
Note that stream.next_recording_id became stream.cum_recordings. I made
a slight definition change in the process: recording ids for new streams
start at 0 rather than 1. Various tests changed accordingly.
The upgrade process makes a best effort to backfill these new fields,
but of course it doesn't know the total duration or number of runs of
previously deleted rows. That's good enough.
Benefits:
* Blake3 is faster. This is most noticeable for the hashing of the
sample file data.
* we no longer need OpenSSL, which helps with shrinking the binary size
(#70). sha1 basically forced OpenSSL usage; ring deliberately doesn't
support this old algorithm, and the pure-Rust sha1 crate is painfully
slow. OpenSSL might still be a better choice than ring/rustls for TLS
but it's nice to have the option.
For the video sample entries, I decided we don't need to hash at all. I
think the id number is sufficiently stable, and it's okay---perhaps even
desirable---if an existing init segment changes for fixes like e5b83c2.
* As discussed in #48, say "The Moonfire NVR Authors" at the top of
every file rather than whoever created that file. Have one AUTHORS
file listing everyone.
* Consistently call it a "security camera network video recorder" rather
than "security camera digital video recorder".
Add a new schema version 5; now 4 means the directory meta may or may
not be upgraded.
Fixes#65: now it's possible to open the directory even if it lies on a
completely full disk.
* install.md, install-manual.md, and easy-install.md had a lot of
redundancy. Rework them so the common prefix and suffix are in
install.md and it's clear when to navigate back and forth. This
removes from very stale references to prep.sh and cameras.sql in
install-manual.md (which never should have mentioned these scripts
anyway).
* remove all the SAMPLE_MEDIA_DIR, SAMPLE_FILE_DIR, and
SAMPLE_FILE_PATH stuff from the scripts. This was too complicated
(one variable will suffice) and inconsistent in terminology (a
couple "samples dir" occurrences slipped through review; they
should have been "sample file dir"). It also wasn't really useful
enough because the procedure for a mount point is manual anyway,
and because some installs will have multiple sample file dirs
anyway.
* in the mount point procedure, fix the paths to be consistent. Also
describe the "nofail" and "Requires=" config I have on my machine.
* fix some incorrect info about how to use "moonfire-nvr config" and
describe "flush_if_sec".
The new numbers are taken from my odroid setup. In particular, the size check
is noticeably slower than what I'd gathered before, enough to show that it
shouldn't be performed on startup.
This is intended to support HTML5 Media Source Extensions, which I expect to
be the most practical way to make a good web UI with a proper scrub bar and
such.
This feature has had very limited testing on Chrome and Firefox, and that was
not entirely successful. More work is needed before it's usable, but this
seems like a helpful progress checkpoint.
There's a lot of work left to do on this:
* important latency optimization: the recording threads block
while fsync()ing sample files, which can take 250+ ms. This
should be moved to a separate thread to happen asynchronously.
* write cycle optimizations: several SQLite commits per camera per minute.
* test coverage: this drops testing of the file rotation, and
there are several error paths worth testing.
* ffmpeg oddities to investigate:
* the out-of-order first frame's pts
* measurable delay before returning packets
* it sometimes returns an initial packet it calls a "key" frame that actually
has an SEI recovery point NAL but not an IDR-coded slice NAL, even though
in the input these always seem to come together. This makes playback
starting from this recording not work at all on Chrome. The symptom is
that it loads a player-looking thing with the proper dimensions but
playback never actually starts.
I imagine these are all related but haven't taken the time to dig through
ffmpeg code and understand them. The right thing anyway may be to ditch
ffmpeg for RTSP streaming (perhaps in favor of the live555 library), as
it seems to have other omissions like making it hard/impossible to take
advantage of Sender Reports. In the meantime, I attempted to mitigate
problems by decreasing ffmpeg's probesize.
* handling overlapping recordings: right now if there's too much time drift or
a time jump, you can end up with recordings that the UI won't play without
manual database changes. It's not obvious what the right thing to do is.
* easy camera setup: currently you have to manually insert rows in the SQLite
database and restart.
but I think it's best to get something in to iterate from.
This deletes a lot of code, including:
* the ffmpeg video sink code (instead now using a bit of extra code in Stream
on top of the SampleFileWriter, SampleIndexEncoder, and MoonfireDatabase
code that's been around for a while)
* FileManager (in favor of new code using the database)
* the old UI
* RealFile and friends
* the dependency on protocol buffers, which was used for the config file
(though I'll likely have other reasons for using protocol buffers later)
* even some utilities like IsWord that were just for validating the config
Scott Lamb