The Decoder's closing point -- the inference is cheap and the measurement looks
expensive right up until someone does it -- is actionable, so the probe I
reverted is now permanent. The exporter records each transcode's duration and
frame rate in the manifest (probed from the file it wrote, not the source), and
every video run prints what it showed against what the media holds. An instrument
that has to be added before the question can be asked will not be there the next
time somebody reasons instead.
Then the instrument corrected me twice more.
It is an UPPER BOUND, not a count. It counts engine frames, and the engine renders
the UI at its own rate: on a quiet box ADV drew 6480 frames across a 4123-frame
video, 44 fps against the media's 30. Above that crossover it constrains nothing,
and '157% presented' is the counter used outside its range. The report now says so
instead of printing a percentage.
So 'the player skips, heavily' is not supported. At 8.3 engine fps under
contention S00A could not have shown more than 28% -- a valid bound under
contention and nothing more. Quiet, the bound is 88-90%, permitting anything from
no drops to a tenth.
And the 720p-versus-432p contrast is refuted -- the finding I sent them twice. I
reported ADV +6.7% against S00A -0.5% and built 'heavy decode falls behind, light
keeps up' on it. Quiet, both run +6.7...+6.9%. The -0.5% was a contended run in
which the player dropped frames to hold schedule. I was measuring which run
happened to share the box and reading it as a property of the resolution.
What survives is sturdier than either: playback runs +6.7%...+6.9% long on this
container, five runs, both videos, quiet, resolution-independent.
Three corrections in three iterations, all mine, all the same shape: argued from
an absence; measured and over-read; then found the measurement was taken under a
confound I introduced myself by running the suite alongside it. Their rule needs a
companion -- ask what the quantity can be skipped by, and ask what else was
running.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01N7FiFFFwbvG2uxdcEh8HyF
1e8c457a8b