time properties

Apr 2, 2012

Support for time values in properties just landed in git. This means properties like in, out, and length that used to take and provide frame counts now also support timecode and clock values. This makes manual authoring and reading XML easier. For example,


$ melt color: out=:5.0 -consumer xml no_meta=1 time_format=smpte
returns the following XML that can also be parsed:
<mlt LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8" version="0.7.9" title="color:">
  <profile description="DV/DVD PAL" width="720" height="576" progressive="0" sample_aspect_num="16" sample_aspect_den="15" display_aspect_num="4" display_aspect_den="3" frame_rate_num="25" frame_rate_den="1" colorspace="601"/>
  <producer id="producer0" in="00:00:00:00" out="00:00:05:00">
    <property name="mlt_type">producer</property>
    <property name="length">00:10:00:00</property>
    <property name="eof">pause</property>
    <property name="resource"></property>
    <property name="aspect_ratio">1.066667</property>
    <property name="mlt_service">color</property>
  </producer>
  <playlist id="playlist0">
    <entry producer="producer0" in="00:00:00:00" out="00:00:05:00"/>
  </playlist>
  <tractor id="tractor0" title="color:" global_feed="1" in="00:00:00:00" out="00:00:05:00">
    <track producer="playlist0"/>
  </tractor>
</mlt>


Hour, minute, and second components are optional, but there must be at least one colon for a string value to be interpreted as time. If the last component contains a radix, then it is interpreted as a clock value instead of a SMPTE timecode. That means, in the above, ":5.0" means 5 seconds, which for 25 frames per seconds, yields a timecode of 00:00:05:00, which could be abbreviated as 5:00 or even 5:. Of course, the numeric locale is supported for period or comma as radix, as needed.

This is exposed through the Mlt::Properties API as well for applications. Variants of other functions that deal with time are slowly being added, but Mlt::Producer::get_length_time() was already added. User interfaces often need to show and accept time values, and this makes it easier to support that in your MLT application.

Lastly, another benefit, is that one can use the clock values in XML, and they will automatically adapt to changes in the profile framerate. Of course, you may lose frame accuracy if you do change the framerate, but that may not matter for some use cases.

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