Skip to content

fix(mediaplayer): let each client reach its own end of stream#978

Merged
dooly123 merged 1 commit into
BasisVR:developerfrom
towneh:fix/mediaplayer-owner-eos-truncation
Jul 21, 2026
Merged

fix(mediaplayer): let each client reach its own end of stream#978
dooly123 merged 1 commit into
BasisVR:developerfrom
towneh:fix/mediaplayer-owner-eos-truncation

Conversation

@towneh

@towneh towneh commented Jul 21, 2026

Copy link
Copy Markdown
Collaborator

Summary

Fixes the tail truncation reported off the 2026-07-20 test night: a late joiner starts at the owner's playhead correctly but stops short of the end of the content, losing roughly its join latency off the tail (measured ~4s on a 1:40 clip, cutting out moments after the owner finished).

The owner was broadcasting a Stop from its own end-of-stream handler, and remote clients applied it wherever their playhead happened to be. Any client behind the owner lost the difference, and a late joiner is always behind. This affects every content type, video included; it just surfaces most readily on late joins.

The fix is a deletion: end-of-stream no longer broadcasts anything. Every peer plays the same source, so each reaches its own end independently; the owner has no way of knowing a peer's drift, so it isn't in a position to decide when that peer has finished. The accepted trade-off is that clients now finish at slightly different wall-clock times rather than together, which beats silently cutting content off. Deliberate stops (the user pressing stop) broadcast from Stop() directly and are unaffected.

TESTING.md's networking scenario now spells out the expected end-of-stream behaviour.

Required checks

All boxes below must be ticked before this PR can merge. If a check is genuinely N/A, tick it anyway and explain under Notes.

  • Tested — I built and ran this locally. The change works in the editor and (where relevant) in a built player.
  • Transform access is combined and limited — In hot paths, transform reads/writes go through TransformAccessArray or are otherwise batched. I have not added per-frame transform.position / transform.rotation / transform.localPosition calls inside loops. Whenever I need both position and rotation, I use the combined APIs — SetPositionAndRotation / SetLocalPositionAndRotation for writes, GetPositionAndRotation / GetLocalPositionAndRotation for reads — instead of two separate property accesses; the combined call does one local-to-world matrix traversal instead of two.
  • Addressables used for asset/memory loading — Any new asset loads go through Addressables. No new Resources.Load, no direct asset references that pull large content into memory on scene load.
  • No new GetComponent / AddComponent where avoidable — Where unavoidable, the result is cached on a field, and any GetComponent<T> is replaced with TryGetComponent<T>(out var x) — bare GetComponent will be denied. TryGetComponent is the modern API (Unity 2019.2+) and skips the Editor-only GC allocation GetComponent causes when a component is missing: Unity wraps the null return in a managed "fake null" object so its overloaded == operator can still detect destroyed C++ objects, and constructing that wrapper allocates; TryGetComponent returns a bool plus out parameter and never builds the wrapper. None of these calls run inside Update, LateUpdate, FixedUpdate, jobs, or other per-frame code paths.
  • Per-frame work is scheduled through BasisEventDriver — Any new per-frame work hooks into BasisEventDriver rather than adding standalone Update / LateUpdate / FixedUpdate callbacks on a MonoBehaviour.
  • Anything added to BasisEventDriver is bulletproof, or guarded by try/catchBasisEventDriver runs the single per-frame tick that drives the whole framework (network apply, local player sim, blendshapes, JigglePhysics, nameplates, and more) as one sequential chain. An unhandled exception anywhere in that chain aborts the rest of the tick, so every step after the throwing one is silently skipped for that frame. New work added to the driver must either be guaranteed not to throw, or be wrapped in a try/catch that contains the failure and surfaces it through BasisDebug — logged once / rate-limited, never every frame (see the existing HVRBasisBuiltInAddresses.Simulate() guard for the pattern). Expect this to be scrutinized closely in review.
  • Considered jobification — I asked whether this work can be moved to a Unity Job (Burst-compiled where possible). If it can, it is. If it cannot, the reason is in Notes.
  • No needless { get; set; } properties or access lockdowns — Public fields are fine; Basis is meant to be read and modified freely, so don't wall things off private/internal without a real reason. Don't wrap a field in { get; set; } when the accessors do nothing — property accessors have a real performance cost vs direct field access, and the lead maintainer prefers plain fields (or a method / setter-only property when only the setter needs logic) over a noop-getter pair. For .Instance singletons, callers reassigning Type.Instance is allowed; if that would break your code, log a warning or throw — don't block the assignment. Locking down access is not your call.
  • Camera access goes through BasisLocalCameraDriver — Code that needs the local camera (transform, projection, rig data, etc.) pulls it from BasisLocalCameraDriver rather than looking one up itself. Don't roll a separate camera discovery path.
  • Logging uses BasisDebug — All new logging calls go through BasisDebug.Log / BasisDebug.LogWarning / BasisDebug.LogError (with an appropriate LogTag) instead of UnityEngine.Debug.Log / Debug.LogWarning / Debug.LogError. BasisDebug routes through Basis's tagged, color-coded logger and respects the project-wide LoggingDisabled toggle so logging can be killed at runtime; bare Debug.Log calls bypass that and will be denied.
  • No scene-wide discovery for dependencies — New code is architected so it does not need FindObjectOfType / FindObjectsOfType / GameObject.Find / FindGameObjectsWithTag to locate what it depends on. References are wired in — registered through an existing manager/driver, injected at init, or passed in by the caller — rather than discovered by scanning the scene at runtime. If a scene scan is genuinely unavoidable, justify it under Notes.
  • No allocations in hot paths — Per-frame code (Update / LateUpdate / FixedUpdate, simulation loops, jobs, anything called once per frame or more) does not allocate. No new on reference types, no LINQ, no string concatenation/interpolation, no boxing, no foreach over interface-typed collections. Allocate once at init and reuse the buffer.
  • No debugging in hot paths — No log calls of any kind on per-frame paths, including BasisDebug. Hot-path logging floods the console and incurs cost on every frame regardless of whether the message is filtered out downstream. If a hot-path log is needed while iterating, gate it behind #if UNITY_EDITOR and remove (or leave gated) before merge.
  • Hot-path collection access is optimized — Cache .Count (lists) / .Length (arrays) into a local int before the loop instead of re-reading the property each iteration. Prefer T[] (with a separate length int when the array is over-sized) over List<T> where the data is hot — Unity's mono BCL doesn't expose CollectionsMarshal.AsSpan(List<T>), so a list can't be fed into Span<T> / unsafe paths cleanly. Where the perf justifies it, drop into Span<T> / ref locals / Unsafe.As / unsafe pointer code to skip bounds checks and copies, and call out the invariants you're relying on under Notes so reviewers can sanity-check them.

Testing details

Tick the platforms you actually tested on. Leave the rest unticked — these are informational and do not block merge.

  • Windows
  • Linux
  • Android
  • iOS
  • macOS

Input / control mode coverage:

  • Tested in VR (note headset under Notes)
  • Tested in desktop / non-VR mode
  • Tested with phone controls (mobile touch input)
  • N/A — change does not touch player/XR/input code

Where applicable, confirm these flows still work after your changes:

  • Hot-switching (desktop ↔ VR mode swap at runtime)
  • Avatar swapping
  • Server swapping (joining / leaving / changing servers)
  • N/A — change does not touch any of the above

Notes

  • The change is C#-only and purely a deletion (the end-of-stream broadcast path); the required checks other than Tested are ticked as N/A on that basis: there are no new components, per-frame work, logging, allocations or asset loads.
  • OnEnded itself stays: the playlist and the rendering placeholder-restore components still subscribe to it. Only the networking subscription is gone, with a comment at the hook site so the absence reads as deliberate.
  • One behaviour that quietly disappears: a remote that stalls and never reaches its own end-of-stream no longer gets force-stopped when the owner finishes. That was never the broadcast's purpose, but flagging it for review.
  • Verification plan before marking Tested: two clients, owner plays https://mr.town/vod/tos_opus.webm (1:40 audio-only), second client joins around halfway, listen through to the end on the late joiner, which should reach the actual end of the clip. A video lane pass on the same shape covers the general case.

…ayback ends

The owner broadcast MessageId.Stop from its own end-of-stream, and remote
clients applied it wherever their playhead happened to be. A late joiner
is behind the owner by its join latency, so it lost exactly that much off
the end of the content (measured: ~4s on a 1:40 clip, stopping moments
after the owner finished). Any content type is affected, video included.

End-of-stream is now per-client: every peer plays the same source and
reaches its own end independently. The owner cannot know a peer's drift,
so it is not in a position to decide when that peer has finished. Clients
finish at slightly different wall-clock times as a result, which beats
silently truncating the tail. Deliberate stops still broadcast from
Stop(), which is unaffected.
@towneh towneh added the bug Something isn't working label Jul 21, 2026
@towneh
towneh requested a review from dooly123 July 21, 2026 18:15
@towneh
towneh marked this pull request as ready for review July 21, 2026 18:22
@dooly123
dooly123 merged commit 1013927 into BasisVR:developer Jul 21, 2026
10 of 13 checks passed
@towneh
towneh deleted the fix/mediaplayer-owner-eos-truncation branch July 21, 2026 23:05
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

bug Something isn't working

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants