Firefox video playback's skip-to-next-keyframe behavior

One of the quirks of Firefox's video playback stack is our skip-to-next-keyframe behavior. The purpose of this blog post is to document the tradeoffs skip-to-next-keyframe makes.

The fundamental question that skip-to-next-keyframe answers is, "what do we do when the video stream decode can't keep up with the playback speed?

Video playback is a classic producer/consumer problem. You need to ensure that your audio and video stream decoders produce decoded samples at a rate no less that the rate at which the audio/video streams need to be rendered. You also don't want to produce decoded samples at a rate too much greater than the consumption rate, else you'll waste memory.

For example, if we're running on a low end PC, playing a 30 frames per second video, and the CPU is so slow that it can only decode an average of 10 frames per second, we're not going to be able to display all video frames.

This is also complicated by our video stack's legacy threading model. Our first video decoding implementation did the decoding of video and audio streams in the same thread. We assumed that we were using software decoding, because we were supporting Ogg/Theora/Vorbis, and later WebM/VP8/Vorbis, which are only commonly available in software.

The pseudo code for our "decode thread" used to go something like this:
 
while (!AudioDecodeFinished() || !VideoDecodeFinished()) {
  if (!HaveEnoughAudioDecoded()) {
    DecodeSomeAudio();
  }
  if (!HaveEnoughVideoDecoded()) {
    DecodeSomeVideo();
  }
  if (HaveLotsOfAudioDecoded() && HaveLotsOfVideoDecoded()) {
    SleepUntilRunningLowOnDecodedData();
  }
}
 
This was an unfortunate design, but it certainly made some parts of our code much simpler and easier to write.

We've recently refactored our code, so it no longer looks like this, but for some of the older backends that we support (Ogg, WebM, and MP4 using GStreamer on Linux), the pseudocode is still effectively (but not explicitly or obviously) this. MP4 on Windows, MacOSX, and Android in Firefox 36 and later now decode asynchronously, so we are not limited to decoding only on one thread.

The consequence of decoding audio and video on the same thread only really bites on low end hardware. I have an old Lenovo x131e netbook, which on some videos can take 400ms to decode a Theora keyframe. Since we use the same thread to decode audio as video, if we don't have at least 400ms of audio already decoded while we're decoding such a frame, we'll get an "audio underrun". This is where we don't have enough audio decoded to keep up with playback, and so we end up glitching the audio stream. This sounds is very jarring to the listener.

Humans are very sensitive to sound; the audio stream glitching is much more jarring to a human observer than dropping a few video frames. The tradeoff we made was to sacrifice the video stream playback in order to not glitch the audio stream playback. This is where skip-to-next-keyframe comes in.

With skip-to-next-keyframe, our pseudo code becomes:

while (!AudioDecodeFinished() || !VideoDecodeFinished()) {
  if (!HaveEnoughAudioDecoded()) {
    DecodeSomeAudio();
  }
  if (!HaveEnoughVideoDecoded()) {
    bool skipToNextKeyframe =
      (AmountOfDecodedAudio < LowAudioThreshold()) ||
       HaveRunOutOfDecodedVideoFrames();
    DecodeSomeVideo(skipToNextKeyframe);
  }
  if (HaveLotsOfAudioDecoded() && HaveLotsOfVideoDecoded()) {
    SleepUntilRunningLowOnDecodedData();
  }
}

We also monitor how long a video frame decode takes, and if a decode takes longer than the low-audio-threshold, we increase the low-audio-threshold.

If we pass a true value for skipToNextKeyframe to the decoder, it is supposed to give up and skip its decode up to the next keyframe. That is, don't try to decode anything between now and the next keyframe.

Video frames are typically encoded as a sequence of full images (called "key frames", "reference frames", or  I-frames in H.264) and then some number of frames which are "diffs" from the key frame (P-Frames in H.264 speak). (H.264 also has B-frames which are a combination of diffs of frames frames both before and after the current frame, which can lead the encoded stream to be muxed out-of-order).

The idea here is that we deliberately drop video frames in the hope that we give time back to the audio decode, so we are less likely to get audio glitches.

Our implementation of this idea is not particularly good.

Often on low end Windows machines playing HD videos without hardware accelerated video decoding, you'll get a run of say half a second of video decoded, and then we'll skip everything up to the next keyframe (a couple of seconds), before playing another half a second, and then skipping again, ad nasuem, giving a slightly weird experience. Or in the extreme, you can end up with only getting the keyframes decoded, or even no frames if we can't get the keyframes decoded in time. Or if it works well enough, you can still get a couple of audio glitches at the start of playback until the low-audio-threshold adapts to a large enough value, and then playback is smooth.

The FirefoxOS MediaOmxReader also never implemented skip-to-next-keyframe correctly, our behavior there is particularly bad. This is compounded by the fact that FirefoxOS typically runs on lower end hardware anyway. The MediaOmxReader doesn't actually skip decode to the next keyframe, it decodes to the next keyframe. This will cause the video decode to hog the decode thread for even longer; this will give the audio decode even less time, which is the exact opposite of what you want to do. What they should do is skip the demux of video up to the next keyframe, but if I recall correctly there was bugs in the Android platform's video decoder library that FirefoxOS is based on that caused this to be unreliable.

All these issues occur because we share the same thread for audio and video decoding. This year we invested some time refactoring our video playback stack to be asynchronous. This enables backends that support it to do their decoding asynchronously, on another own thread. So since audio decodes on a separate thread to video, we should have glitch-free audio even when the video decode can't keep up, even without engaging skip-to-next-keyframe. We still need to do something like skipping the video decode when the video decode is falling behind, but it can probably engage less aggressively.

I did a quick test the other day on a low end Windows 8.0 tablet with an Atom Z2760 CPU with skip-to-next-keyframe disabled and async decoding enabled, and although the video decode falls behind and gets out of sync with audio (frames are rendered late) we never glitched audio.

So I think it's time to revisit our skip-to-next-keyframe logic, since we don't need to sacrifice video decode to ensure that audio playback doesn't glitch.

When using async decoding we still need some mechanism like skip-to-next-keyframe to ensure that when the video decode falls behind it can catch up. The existing logic to engage skip-to-next-keyframe also performs that role, but often we enter skip-to-next-keyframe and start dropping frames when video decode actually could keep up if we just gave it a chance. This often happens when switching streams during MSE playback.

Now that we have async decoding, we should experiment with modifying the HaveRunOutOfDecodedVideoFrames() logic to be more lenient, to avoid unnecessary frame drops during MSE playback. One idea would be to only engage skip-to-next-keyframe if we've missed several frames. We need to experiment on low end hardware.