Life of a Netflix Partner Engineer – The case of the extra 40 ms
I kind of wish the author touched more on the one-frame-at-a-time aspect. Why <i>aren't</i> they copying more data into the device decoder? It seems somewhat silly on a non-realtime OS to grab one frame, request a 15ms wait, and then grab another frame, when your deadline is 16.6ms. That essentially guarantees a stuttering playback at some point, no?<p>Is there not a better way to do this? There must be. Why not copy 10 frames at a time? Is the device decoder buffer that small? Is there no native Android support for pointing a device decode buffer to a data ingress source and having the OS fill it when it empties, without having to "poll" every 15ms? So many questions.