[MPlayer-dev-eng] Re: MPlayer hicups

[Corey Hickey]

Attila Kinali wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Sep 2006 08:01:04 +0200
> Attila Kinali <attila at kinali.ch> wrote:
> 
>> When i start MPlayer, the whole system freezes for about
>> 10 to 20 seconds. But it only happens in about one of
>> 50 to 100 cases. I asked a few guys who know the kernel
>> better than i do, but they did not have an answer on
>> what it could be. Because the system locks up everything,
>> i do not even get data from the standard statistics
>> tools (vmstat&co).
> 
> Maybe i should add a better description on what i see.
> MPlayer starts, opens a x11 window for xv, seems to put
> some data into the soundcard (i get <1s of sound) then
> the system blocks. On the command line i have a preliminary
> status line with lots of question marks in it. 10 to 20s later
> the movie plays fine, first starting with some A-V desync,
> but smaller than the 10-20s.
> 
> I could not see any relation to specific file types.
> I did not try different vo modules as xv is the only
> playable on my laptop. Soundcard is a i8x0 (ICH4-x)
> used via the OSS emulation of alsa. Kernel is currently
> a 2.6.17 but it happend also with older kernels in
> the 2.6. series.

I have no idea, but there are a few things you can try in order to
possibly narrow it down.

Is there any hard disk activity? Can you hear it or see the LED blinking?

Does it happen with audio-only files?

Does it happen with -nosound?

In such an intermittent case, it may be difficult to know. Does the
problem manifest if you run mplayer lots and lots of times in a row?
$ for ((i=0; i<200; ++i)) ; do mplayer file.avi -frames 10 ; done
...or, in a directory with lots of files...
$ for file in * ; do mplayer $file -frames 10 ; done

-Corey