[MPlayer-users] video buffer full

[Philip Walden]

I'd like to record a broadcast signal to a file. So I have been reading 
and looking about and have come up with the following command line:

mencoder -tv on:driver=v4l:width=640:height=480:norm=ntsc -ovc lavc 
-lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=350 -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=48  
-sws 1 -o output.avi

This works great for about 40 seconds and then the following message 
scrolls repeatedly up my screen.

video buffer full - dropping frame

At this point I interrupt the mencoder. The output file is about 2GB and 
looks fine. I see that my disk activity is not very high during the 
process, so I doubt it is my disk write rate that is the bottleneck. I 
cannot do multiple passes as I am recording live TV broadcasts.

So what can i do to up the frame/audio processing rate? Being a novice, 
I am not sure what dials to tweak to reduce the load on my cpu and  
eliminate the bottleneck. Lower quality is just fine. I just want to 
recognize enough to get the storyline.

I have a 800MHz athalon with 256MB ram (the max). I know this is not 
much (these days) but that is all I have right now.

Thanks

Phil