I have no idea how any of you have kept this conversation going when one of the main protagonists is not even subscribed to one of the two mailing lists, and i suspect that one of the others isn't subscribed to the other. perhaps the FFmpeg-devel list doesn't require membership. anyway, i've finally had enough of reading Michael's stuff about buffers, timing and so forth and felt obligated to comment. michael - i would politely request that you stop shooting off at the mouth about stuff that the JACK community has been dealing with for more than 9 years. you do not need to write your own ring buffer code - JACK's is LGPL'ed and you are free (and probably even recommended) to copy it. furthermore, you would be very foolish to imagine (especially based on your incredibly naive comments about uint8_t) that you understand the subtleties of these buffers. the JACK community (and a couple of other exclusively audio-focused development groups) have been working with this buffer design for many, many years, and we are absolutely confident that our buffers are (a) SMP/multi-core safe (b) as efficient as they can be without using assembler. you should also be aware that there are very good arguments for the current structure of the ringbuffer code, which explicitly does NOT use any memory barriers. if you don't understand why it works without them, then you should probably refrain from commenting on the design of these buffers at all.