mediatimestamp

Nanosecond precision timestamps for python.

Introduction

This library provides nanosecond precision timestamps in python. These timestamps are intended primarily for use in representing times in TAI distributed via the PTP protocol (IEEE 1588).

Installation

Requirements

• A working Python 3.10+ installation
• The tool Docker is needed to run the tests, but not required to use the library.

Steps

# Install from pip
$ pip install mediatimestamp

# Install directly from source repo
$ git clone [email protected]:bbc/rd-apmm-python-lib-mediatimestamp.git
$ cd rd-apmm-python-lib-mediatimestamp
$ make install

Usage

from mediatimestamp.immutable import Timestamp

# Print the current time in seconds:nanoseconds format
print(Timestamp.get_time())

This module provides three main classes which are used for representing time:

• Timestamp represents an instant in time expressed as a nanosecond precision timestamp.
• TimeRange represents a time range defined by its start and end timestamps, which may be inclusive of neither, one, or both of its ends.

For backwards compatibility reasons the classes can be imported either directly from the base level of mediatimestamp or as mediatimestamp.immutable.

In addition a submodule mediatimestamp.hypothesis.strategies is provided for those who wish to make use of these timestamps in code that is to be tested using the hypothesis library. The strategies provided in this module allow the creation of hypothesis based tests which make use of Timestamp and TimeRange objects.

Documentation

The API is well documented in the docstrings of the module mediatimestamp, to view:

make docs

This command will render documentation as HTML in the /docs directory.

A rendered version of this documentation is available here.

Development

Commontooling

This repository uses a library of makefiles, templates, and other tools for development tooling and CI workflows. To discover operations that may be run against this repo, run the following in the top level of the repo:

$ make

Testing

To run the unittests for this package in a docker container follow these steps:

$ git clone [email protected]:bbc/rd-apmm-python-lib-mediatimestamp.git
$ cd rd-apmm-python-lib-mediatimestamp
$ make test

Continuous Integration

This repository includes GitHub Actions workflows for CI. The shared workflows are centrally managed and should not be modified.

Versioning

We use Semantic Versioning for this repository

Contributing

The code in this repository was previously released as part of the nmos-common library (https://github.com/bbc/nmos-common/). For contributing work please see the file CONTRIBUTING.md in this repository.

Please ensure you have run the test suite before submitting a Pull Request, and include a version bump in line with our Versioning policy.

Authors

• James Weaver
• Philip deNier
• Sam Nicholson
• James Sandford
• Alex Rawcliffe

For further information, contact [email protected]

License

See LICENSE.md