media hub instability when trying to play inline videos

[Michael Zanetti]

See the attached telegram app, it supports inline GIF playback in conversations. The telegram server converts GIFs to MP4 files server-side, so gifs are just like videos but they are set to autoplay and are played in a loop.

There are multiple issues:
* For once, it can only play a single inline gif at a time, if there are multiple gifs in a conversation, all but one will stay black. I suppose this is because of the hardware decoding and probably nothing we can do about it except making the app more clever so it only tries to play one of them

* The short video is not played properly. I can just see the first and the last frame jumping back and forward.

* Scrolling, the image in the video inverts and flickers

* scrolling past the video, so that the delegate with the VideoOutput is destroyed and back so that it is recreated, crashes the app.

(NOTE: The app is a work in progress, currently it doesn't do well with error handling, if you enter the phone number or pin wrong during setup, you need to restart it and start from scratch)

[Jim Hodapp (jhodapp)]

Have you tried playing any of these videos in mediaplayer-app? How about the inline dash video player in the video scope? Any different results there?

You are correct in that we can only play one video at a time at the moment due to how things are wired up with hardware video acceleration. I'm not sure if more than one is possible with hardware acceleration. Would need to investigate this further. This might be a good case for software decoding, but we currently don't have that path working at the moment via GStreamer. It only ever tries to use hardware video codecs for all video playback.