How to sleep or pause a PThread in c on Linux

Question

I am developing an application in which I do multithreading. One of my worker threads displays images on the widget. Another thread plays sound. I want to stop/suspend/pause/sleep the threads on a button click event. It is same as when we click on video player play/pause button. I am developing my application in c++ on linux platform using the pthread library for threading.

Can somebody tell me how I achieve threads pause/suspend?

Answer 1

You can use a mutex, condition variable, and a shared flag variable to do this. Let's assume these are defined globally:

pthread_mutex_t lock = PTHREAD_MUTEX_INITIALIZER;
pthread_cond_t cond = PTHREAD_COND_INITIALIZER;
int play = 0;

You could structure your playback code like this:

for(;;) { /* Playback loop */
    pthread_mutex_lock(&lock);
    while(!play) { /* We're paused */
        pthread_cond_wait(&cond, &lock); /* Wait for play signal */
    }
    pthread_mutex_unlock(&lock);
    /* Continue playback */
}

Then, to play you can do this:

pthread_mutex_lock(&lock);
play = 1;
pthread_cond_signal(&cond);
pthread_mutex_unlock(&lock);

And to pause:

pthread_mutex_lock(&lock);
play = 0;
pthread_mutex_unlock(&lock);

Answer 2

You have your threads poll for "messages" from the UI at regular interval. In other words, UI in one thread posts action messages to the worker threads e.g. audio/video.