[Mplayer-dvb] Playback probs

[Michael Collard]

On Wed, 2004-06-30 at 17:49, Nico Sabbi wrote:

> You clipped too much of the logs, otherwise you would have realized that
> before that message mplayer printed "Your system is too slow to play 
> this..."
> showing
> - a huge amount of dropped frames
> - a very high audio_out %
> - cache fill 0%.
> I get the same problem on some low-bitrate satellite transponders.
> It seems that mplayer is incurring in buffer underrun problems, that is
> in data starvation, maybe because it decodes audio and video too fast,
> faster than it can receive data from the card.
> This happens because mplayer doesn't synchronize to to the PCR (the
> reference clock associated to each program) but syncs audio and video
> to each other( if you search in the archives of mplayer-users you can find
> Arpi's explanation).
> 
> I haven't found a definitive solution, yet, but you can somewhat reduce 
> the problem
> with some workarounds:
> 1) make sure you are using the last cvs
> 2) use the RTC, not the soundcard clock
> 3) use -mc 0.1
> 4) eventually slow down playback a little (unperceivable) bit with 
> -speed 0.98
> 5) use a larger cache ( I use 8192)

So far I've changed the cache to 8192 and this has improved greatly.
Still, I think that MPlayer should simply flush the buffers and start
again if this problem occurs. How hard would it be to add this
capability do you think?

Regards
Michael collard