Re:The Case of the Extra 40ms
by csharptwdec19 on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @10:20AM
(#25431059)
Stupid thought, especially thinking about Netflix's history as one of the earliest services that streamed licensed content, it would not surprise me if this was at some point a way to minimize how much unencrypted data was in memory or similar.
Other thought would be, whether the architecture was somehow related to how one had to do things in Silverlight (any silverlight devs still remember how one would do this sort of thing? Any Silverlight devs still around?)
It's probably easier to keep the audio and video in sync with a simple implementation. They can't really drift out of sync if all that's being one is handling one frame at a time.
Though it sounds like they aren't even getting that advantage, because the audio thread is separate, and the described problem is starvation of the audio buffer alone.
So the real question should be, does Netflix have a valid reason for only delivering a single frame of video and audio at a time? Is it bad software design, or good software design for an unknown problem (to us)?
I've seen plenty of things that looked stupid out of context, then made sense later on after understanding why the "stupid" things was done in the first place.