[MPlayer-dev-eng] Seeking in MPEG2/MPEG4 streams

[Barnabas Hajas]

Dear Community, Dear Developers!

I've been using mplayer for 5 years. The higher mplayer versions have
been released the slower seeking in MPEG2/MPEG4 streams got. In
mplayer 1.0rc1 released in 2006 seeking in any MPEG2/MPEG4 stream (DVD
VOB, DVB recording etc.) is smooth, but versions higher than 1.0rc2 or
the one I use now (SVN-r29355-4.5.0) almost doesn't show any frame at
all when seeking. I guess above mplayer 1.0rc2 doesn't loop through B
frames (which causes the blocky transiton between frames when seeking
- shown below at the test). I don't understand why it was good for
developers to completely remove this kind of feature release by
release. I hope this has something to do with libmpeg2 or an option
(e.g. -lavdopts) which default value was changed during the releases.

Example image: http://kepfeltoltes.hu/100103/flatt1_www.kepfeltoltes.hu_.png

Attached image shows testing MPEG-2: This sequence of still images
were created specifying -vo png, I pressed the right arrow (seeking
forwards) continuously till the movie clip ended. Finally collected
stills with IrfanView Thumbnails. It shows that mplayer 1.0rc1 does
the job well. SVN-r29355-4.5.0 didn't produce any images during
seeking. I don't want to use older mplayer versions due to bugs and
format-incompatiblity issues, but I really really miss this feature.
Same case at DivX/XviD. Is there some workaround to resurrect fast
seeking?

As mentioned on the index page www.mplayerhq.hu, SVN versions are
recommended with the SMPlayer GUI. This GUI doesn't support real-time
seeking at all. When I drag the slider and start moving it nothing
happens, only when I drop it does mplayer seek to a SINGLE frame. This
makes impossible to search anything in a movie quickly and efficiently
and I don't understand why this was messed up while it worked so well
in earlier releases.

Regards
Barnabas Hajas [hajbazer]

P.S.: This issue was also reported on the MPlayer User's forum at
Hungarian Unix Portal (in Hungarian): http://hup.hu/node/80969