[MPlayer-users] suspend background tasks on play

[Gábor Lénárt]

On Sun, Sep 21, 2003 at 01:47:52PM +0100, Joe Barnett wrote:
> I normally run Mplayer on an Xbox with seti at home at nice -19 in the
> background but it seems that task switching causes occasional picture
> freezes, stopping the seti task allows (mostly) smooth plaback.

Hemm? -19????? You mean 19, right? Negative values makes scheduler
to prefer processes over eg positive value niced processes. So you
should lower the nice value of the seti at home, and maybe make MPlayer's
nice higher ('higher' means lower number, do not allow yourself to be
confused here ;-)

If it does not help:
Please note, that this should be the problem of the Linux scheduler and
not Mplayer's. There is a great amount of work to avoid these kind of
problems in O(1) scheduler in 2.5/2.6-test kernels though. This topic
is whole around not to allow a 'media app' to skip, even under high load.
They also test XMMS, xine, and once I saw Mplayer as well ...
(ok, this should be called 'interactive processes' and not 'media app' though ;-)

> I'm wondering if there is a way to have an external script excecute when
> a stop play or pause command is received. The external script could then
> pause the background task, or anything else.

BTW, this Xbox topic is also interesting for me, what kind of video output
driver (vo) are you using? Is there a general problem with using mplayer
on xbox?

- Gábor (larta'H)