[Matroska-devel] EBML buffer construction

[Yann Renard]

Hi people,

As some of you may know, I have decided to use EBML in my current 
project so to encode several types of stream. We will later use matroska 
as a container for our dumped streams. However, my implementation of the 
EBML spec for the buffer construction part is basically based on a 
single callback taking a void* pointer and an integer size with the 
bytes to append to the buffer. The EBML spec encodes a node in three 
parts : an identifier, the node size and the node data or children. The 
two first parameters are encoded on a variable length, depending on 
their value. The total size of a node can only be computed when all of 
its children sizes are known. Thus the buffer construction can only be 
performed when the top most node is closed. Now, when this particular 
node is closed, the buffer construction starts, calling repeatedly the 
callback function, first with the first node's id, the first node size, 
and so on for its children...

What I want to discuss with you tonight, is a way to improve this buffer 
construction. First, I would like to avoid so many calls to the callback 
function. For this to be done, the writer could prepare an internal 
buffer which is finally sent in a single call to the callback. Second, I 
would like it to be as fast as possible, thus trying to avoid the 
internal bufferization. Problem is I can not guess the total size of the 
buffer a priori.

Do any of you have any impressions to share about this ?

Thank you,
Best regards,
Yann