[MPlayer-users] Watching SAT TV on Framebuffer

[Marc Packenius]

Hi there,

while I'm waiting for an MPEG encoder (DXR3) to arrive, I'm trying to
watch the output of an Nova-S DVB card using mplayer on a framebuffer
device (it seems that's the best way to get output from a G450 to the
TV).

Playing the stream works fine for a while, but while audio is perfect,
the video frame rate seems to be steadily decreasing (with -autosync
100), until, after a while (sometimes minutes, sometimes hours), the TV
stream is merely a slide show with only two or three frames per second.

With -autosync 30, video output started lagging massively compared to
audio. Killing and restarting mplayer (w/o restarting the DVB frontend)
resolves the problem - for a while.

I do not get any 'Your system is TOO SLOW to play this' messages. And if
I did, I wouldn't believe that - the system in question is an 1GHz
Athlon-powered dedicated multimedia machine (ie. there's virtually
nothing running on the machine but szap, ts2ps and mplayer).

I'm using 0.90rc2-2.95.4. Here's my command line:

    ts2ps </dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 0 0 | \
        mplayer -framedrop -vm -fbmode PAL -cache 1024 \
            -vop expand=768:576,scale=768:-2 -sws 2 \
            -bpp 32 -double -menu -autosync 100 \
            -ao sdl -vo fbdev -fb $FRAMEBUFFER -

(I'm open for all suggestions considering the options I selected...)

Any ideas how to resolve the problem?

[BTW: If anybody has ever used such a setup to watch TV - can you
recommend an alternative to szap that works with current DVB drivers? 
Changing a channel currently requires killing szap and mplayer, and
restarting both; if I just kill and restart szap, mplayer will hang
instead of recovering when new stream data arrives - which could just as
well be a ts2ps problem.]

Thanks,
-- 
Marc Packenius @ 4P | Zentrale Seitenauslieferung, Düsseldorf

Honesty is the key to a relationship. If you can fake that, you're in.
 	-- Rich Jeni