[MPlayer-users] MPlayer discountinuity with SuSE Linux 8.2

[Karai Csaba]

Hi!

I've noticed that MPlayer 0.9.0 sometimes stops for a while with SuSE
8.2. It did not do that with SuSE 8.1. The situation occured at playing 
divx and mpg, with xv, aa and x11 drivers as well.

When mplayer hanged the led of the winchester was blinking which
indicated winchester operation. 

I've made two tests about it:

1. I stopped nearly all components in my linux system except the alsa 
   sound driver, and used aa for testing. MPlayer also stopped for a
   while. When MPlayer hanged, I heard, that the winchester's rpm
   was increasing. Maybe it was stopped.

   I've checked BIOS, and the Power Management was on, but the 
   hard disk section was disabled. I've disabled the power management at
   all, and that solved this bug.

   Why was it working with SuSE 8.1 ( kernel 2.4.19 ) and caused 
   problem with 8.2 (kernel 2.4.20) ?

   This workaround did not solve the total problem, only the number of
   hangs was fewer.

2. MPlayer worked properly after system reboots, but if I ran other 
   programs before using MPlayer, the stops came again. At these times
   the winchester was reading or writing something heavily.
   Top showed, that there was little free memory in the system, but
   100MByte was buffered and other 100 MByte was cached. The used swap
   memory size was one or two MBytes. I've noticed at using KDE, that
   there were sometimes winchester operations longing for a second or
   more without even touching the computer or starting an application.
   These mistical winchester reads or writes stopped when I stopped 
   KDE and the X server. The DMA of the winchester is of course on.

Do you have an idea about the problem?

Thanks,
    Csaba Karai