[MPlayer-users] Problems playing with vdr streams.

[Josef Wolf]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 01:09:06AM -0700, RC wrote:
> Josef Wolf <jw at raven.inka.de> wrote:
> 
> > With this option it don't crash anymore.  But audio is missing.  And
> > occasionally (about every minute) video humbles and artifacts. :-(
> Just a wild guess, but perhaps this is an audio sampling issue?  Try
> adding -srate 44100 (or 48000, or any other standard value) and see if
> it solves the problem.  Couldn't hurt.

After a lot of experiments, I think I start to understand at least one
part of the problem:

The stream comes live directly from a DVB-S card.  So there is really
_no_ way to change the speed at which data is ariving.
Now when mplayer plays a little bit faster than data is delivered,
eventually the cache will get empty.  Now mplayer notice that it can't
play as fast as it would like so it thinks the system is too slow and
start dropping frames.  But since the cache is empty, dropping frames
makes things even worse.

On the other hand, when playing slower than data is coming, mplayer exits
with an "End of file" mesage.  I don't understand this effect at all.

The bad news is that every channel seems to need different -speed settings.
Even on the same channel is seems that the needed setting changes over the
time.  So guessing the correct -speed setting via try-and-error is not an
option :-(

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-- Josef Wolf -- jw at raven.inka.de --