avformat/matroskadec: Allow to count the number of element occurences

Up until now, the generic EBML reader used by the Matroska demuxer did
not have the capability to record whether an element was actually
present or not; instead, in cases where it mattered one typically added
an invalid default value and checked whether the value is valid (in
which case it is guaranteed to be present). This worked pretty well so
far, yet the EBML specifications have evolved: It is now legal to use
zero-length elements for floats, ints, uints and strings (both ASCII and
UTF-8); the value of these elements is the default value of the element
(if it has one) or zero for scalar types and an empty string for
strings. Furthermore, having a default value does no longer imply that
the element may be presumed to be present (with its default value) if it
is absent; this is only true if the element is mandatory, too.

These rules are designed to allow size savings as follows: Consider the
newly added FlagOriginal: It being zero means the track is not in its
original language, it being one means it is. For backward compatibility
reasons, neither of the two values may be inferred automatically in the
absence of the element. But one can still save a byte when one wants to
write the element with a value of zero, as one can write the integer with
a length of zero: 0x55AE 80 instead of 0x55AE 81 00. In the former case,
a parser has to infer the value of the element to be zero (which is the
element's default value).

When encountering an element with length zero, our parser always infers
a value of zero (or an empty string); this is wrong for values with
a different default value. It needs to infer the default value (or zero
in its absence) and this precludes using an invalid default value for
elements like FlagOriginal. Ergo one needs to be able to record whether
an element is present or not by other means. This patch allows to use a
simple counter for this. While just at it, some invalid and unnecessary
default values have been removed (mastering metadata elements used
default values of -1.0, despite these elements only being used if they
are > 0).

Reviewed-by: Ridley Combs <rcombs@rcombs.me>
Signed-off-by: Andreas Rheinhardt <andreas.rheinhardt@gmail.com>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions