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I am looking to understand how recording video (and audio) and playing it back in realtime work (on the same pc or over a network)? I understand for a file stored on the disk. You read it and play it back but in recoding, you don't know how long the file is, when it will end etc. Can someone explain it, preferably using some code (or psudocode)?

Thanks

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Rather than saving to a file, the data is sent to a stream. Rather than taking the data and storing it, the OS/whatever takes a bite of the data and an immediately sends it to... wherever. – Philip Oct 31 '12 at 16:50
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Why do you need the file size to play a file? You just need to find whether you've reached the end or not (unless you want to jump between positions or such, which doesn't make sense for real-time) And then ... a file is just a specialized stream ... and a stream can be a network stream or some other IPC mechanism or ... – johannes Oct 31 '12 at 17:06

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1 Answer

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Okay here is about how it could work, in pseudocode:

1. record 1/100 seconds of media to a file
   on some very fast disk (think RAM disk)
2.1. play back recorded file from disk
2.2. in the same time, record
     next 1/100 seconds of media to next file
3. go to 2.1 above and repeat
   until stop button is pressed

As you may note, above playback goes with 2*(1/100) = 1/50 seconds delay, expecting that this is not noticeable for listener.

Above, step 2.1 assumes that you understand for a file stored on the disk as you mentioned. Approach like that - doing something more complicated based on what you already know - is called decomposition.

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