The receiver decoded H.264 to YUV420P, converted it to RGBA via a
CPU-intensive swscale pass, then uploaded 4 bytes/pixel to an SDL
texture — only for the GPU to convert back to RGB during rendering.
This eliminated the swscale pass entirely (40-60% of receiver CPU at
1080p) and cut the texture upload by 62%.
- DecodedFrame now carries three YUV420P planes with their strides
instead of a packed RGBA buffer; the decoder copies the planes
directly from the AVFrame (zero conversion for the common software
path). Non-YUV420P decoder output (e.g. NV12 from v4l2m2m) is
converted once to YUV420P.
- The SDL renderer uploads via SDL_UpdateYUVTexture with
SDL_PIXELFORMAT_IYUV; the GPU does the YUV→RGB conversion during
rendering.
- Decoder threading: slice-level with 4 threads (parallelizes within a
frame, no added latency), not frame-level (which buffers multiple
frames — the initial thread_count=0 broke the loopback test because
the H.264 decoder introduced a multi-frame delay before producing
output).
- The round-trip test converts decoded YUV back to RGBA for pixel
comparison via a test-local swscale call (the pipeline itself never
converts).
meson test 5/5 in both configurations, valgrind clean.
Loss recovery for the streaming path:
- PLI over signaling: the depacketizer now reports damaged frames
(DepacketizeResult) and the receiver asks the sender for a keyframe
(SessionPli, rate-limited to one per 500 ms). The sender keeps the
signaling channel open during the session and honors PLIs through
the new thread-safe SenderPipeline::request_keyframe(). Recovery
takes one frame time instead of waiting out the GOP.
- RtpJitterBuffer: reorders RTP packets by sequence number (16 packets
/ 60 ms) before the in-order depacketizer, so Wi-Fi reordering is
not misread as loss; in-order streams release immediately, and a
straggler older than the delivered sequence is discarded.
- Hardware H.264 decode probe: DecoderFactory tries h264_v4l2m2m (the
VideoCore path on the Pi) with an automatic software fallback and a
clear journal line for the chosen path; --swdecode opts out.
Validated: PLI end-to-end with a probe that drops a mid-keyframe
packet over real UDP (receiver logged the damaged frame and the PLI
arrived with the session id); hardware probe fails cleanly and falls
back on this desktop; jitter reordering covered by unit tests.
meson test 5/5 in both build configurations, valgrind clean.
Add mDNS/DNS-SD discovery and JSON session negotiation so two peers on
a LAN connect without hard-coded addresses.
- Discovery (Avahi threaded-poll client): the receiver announces
_screencast._tcp with its signaling port; senders browse and resolve
peers. Strict lock ordering (poll lock before state mutex) keeps the
callbacks deadlock-free; name collisions rename via
avahi_alternative_service_name.
- Signaling: one JSON object per newline-terminated TCP line. The
receiver hosts a server (port 5005) and answers session offers with
its RTP port; senders connect, offer, and stream to the negotiated
endpoint. WebSocket was deferred: no WS library is installed, the
skill permits plain TCP, and the wire format is transport-agnostic.
- Dual-stack transports: this machine resolves its own services over
IPv6, so getaddrinfo now runs AF_UNSPEC and listeners bind IPv6 with
IPV6_V6ONLY=0 (IPv4 fallback), covering UDP and TCP alike. The
signaling client shutdown now uses shutdown() so a reader blocked in
recv() cannot hang the join (a plain close() does not wake it).
- CLI: --discover lists receivers (deduped to one entry per host);
--send auto-disovers when exactly one receiver is found; --peer
targets a receiver directly; --signaling-port overrides the default.
Validation: meson test 5/5 (new signaling round-trip test), valgrind
clean. End-to-end over loopback: --discover finds the announced
receiver, a probe negotiated a session and streamed 60 frames over
both IPv4 and IPv6, and the receiver reported stream started. mDNS
resolution was verified against avahi-browse as an independent
reference.
Wire the first end-to-end pipeline: capture -> encode -> packetize ->
UDP -> depacketize -> decode -> render.
- UdpRtpTransport: raw POSIX UDP sockets (IPv4 via getaddrinfo), a
receive jthread woken by socket close on stop; port 0 skips binding
so the sender uses an OS-assigned source port. ASIO stays deferred
to the signaling phase per ARCHITECTURE.md.
- SdlRenderer: SDL3 window/renderer with RGBA texture upload; the
texture is recreated on resolution change. RendererFactory now
returns RendererResult so SDL init failures carry a message,
mirroring the codec/capture error patterns.
- screencast binary: parse_cli plus SenderPipeline/ReceiverPipeline
per the app scaffolds; the sender creates its encoder once capture
reports real dimensions, the receiver keeps a bounded 3-frame queue
to hold latency down and renders on its own thread until the window
closes. cli argv signature fixed to 'const char* const*' so main's
argv converts implicitly.
- Encoder: drop AV_CODEC_FLAG_GLOBAL_HEADER so libx264 repeats SPS/PPS
in-band at each keyframe -- the receiver decodes from the bitstream
alone, which also makes mid-stream joins and later PLI recovery
work without out-of-band parameter negotiation. The round-trip test
now exercises exactly that path.
- tests: new udp-loopback integration test pushes synthetic frames
through a real localhost socket and decodes 10/10 frames with the
right dimensions; valgrind clean (loopback + codec). meson test 4/4.
Manual validation on the desktop (receiver window shows the captured
desktop) is documented in docs/RUNBOOK.md.
Add the sc_network library: RFC 3550 RtpHeader/RtpPacket serialize and
parse (the receiver tolerates CSRC lists, extension headers, and
padding by skipping/stripping them) and RFC 6184 H.264 payloading via
H264Packetizer/H264Depacketizer.
The packetizer splits Annex-B frames into NAL units (3- and 4-byte
start codes), emitting single-NAL packets or FU-A fragments within the
configured MTU, with the marker bit closing each frame and randomized
SSRC/sequence by default. The depacketizer reassembles access units
with 3-byte start codes, so both start-code widths round-trip
byte-exactly; frames damaged by sequence gaps or missing fragments
are dropped until the Phase 7 loss-recovery work.
test_rtp covers header and packet round-trips, malformed-input
rejections, splitter behavior, FU-A chunk bounds, full packetize ->
depacketize round-trip, gap dropping, marker-only frame separation,
sequence wrap, and empty inputs. meson test 3/3, valgrind clean.
Add FFmpeg-based encoder/decoder with SPS/PPS extradata, Annex-B output
normalization, low-latency libx264 settings, and a round-trip unit test.
Includes review hardening: cached SwsContext, bitrate-only rate control,
std::byte/uin8_t cast helpers, and richer test assertions.
fegger