[MPlayer-users] Jumpy capturing from tv with mencoder

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sat, Feb 22, 2003 at 03:37:29PM +0000, Giles RC Morant wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 14:18, Jukka Kajava wrote:
> > [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> > I started getting problems with mencoder and tv input
> > after I upgraded my kernel to 2.4.21-pre4 from 2.4.19.
> > The picture is jumpy and every 5 seconds or so I get a
> > line
> 
> Could this be to do with the default 5 seconds for ext3 syncing to
> disk?  Try running vmstat and see if any processes are blocked/waiting
> when disk writes occur.  I often have to run "watch sync" to enable
> smooth progress.  Mencoder doesn't do any work when it needs to write to
> disk -- something to do with the thread-free architecture?
> You can also edit the bdflush parameters to have a similar effect if
> watch sync helps.

echo "5 20 0 0 100 6000 90 20 0" > /proc/sys/vm/bdflush

RTFM the kernel docs for info on what these numbers do and to tune
them for your system! Using my defaults may be a bad idea!

Rich