Round 7 enumerated the state space of SeamPlan::place and found three more
holes in the mark heuristics — the third consecutive round to find a defect
here, each time in the guard the previous round added:
- a clip file opening ON its own IN mark, after a tail frame past the previous
clip OUT had already advanced the cursor, read as another crossing and jumped
a clip too far: 28 minutes of clip 6 dropped;
- the last clip was unguarded entirely (`clip + 1 < len` skipped the check), so
the 9->10 seam rewound 75.6s with dropped_total() at 0 — the exact round-5
signature, reachable without any corrupt input;
- a glitch mid-clip satisfies "inside the current clip", so the round-6
stranding survived for the rest of that clip.
Three patches to the same heuristic, three wrong in a new way. So stop patching
it. Everything above the placement is still heuristics over marks, but the
property they exist to serve is now checked DIRECTLY: a track output must not
run backwards. A placement that would rewind by more than
DISCONTINUITY_BACKSTEP_NS is refused; the scan then looks for a LATER clip
containing the frame that does not rewind, which is exactly what a genuine
overlap crossing looks like; and if none exists the frame is dropped and
counted, because emitting it anywhere moves the track backwards.
The tolerance is the backstep constant because B-frame reorder legitimately
emits out of order by a fraction of a second, while a rewind that matters is
orders of magnitude larger.
The cursor moves ONLY when a later clip actually accepts the frame. My first
version of this advanced on a failed search, which strands a track exactly as
before — caught immediately by the round-6 regression test.
All 29 previous timeline tests still pass, including
continuity_preserves_forward_gap. The three round-7 scenarios now have a test
each, with the real 00801.mpls numbers.
Matthew Jackson
c3e82f28b5