[MPlayer-users] Getting "Your system is too SLOW to play this!" message - some help please!

[mplayer at haxware.co.uk]

Hi folks.

Basically, the project that I am working on at the moment contains one
device with video inputs that streams data using RTSP and then we have
another device running Linux and a custom application which itself will
use mplayer for displaying this video stream.

Unfortunately, I am having problems just getting mplayer to play the
stream stably, in a stand-alone manner.  After a somewhat random period of
time (sometimes just 4 or 5 minutes - other times, over an hour) I get the

"Your system is too SLOW to play this!"

message and the video decoding slows to a crawl and the resulting picture
ends up getting very blocky - especially when motion occurs.  This problem
is occuring on my workstation and on the target platform and with pre07,
pre08 and CVS builds of mplayer.  My workstation is a dual 3.6GHz P4 XEON
with 2GB of RAM and it shows mplayer as only using about 7 to 8 % of CPU -
so, it's clear that there are plenty of resources available.

Video is bein forced to x11 and audio to alsa.

I've tried playing with various other flags, including:
-vfm ffmpeg
-vf pp
-autosync
-nosound

None of these solve the problem - at best, they simply delay it slightly.

I know that the video stream is "good" as it's been viewed using different
applications both on Linux and under Windows and I am currently running
VLC on my workstation to see if that suffers the same problem (to try and
eliminate a problem with Live555).  So far, VLC is fine - although this
doesn't mean that it won't suffer the problem if it turns out that it is
in fact a Live555 isssue as the randomness of time it takes to occur is so
large.

Other than that, I'm fairly stumped as to where to start looking next.

Anyone got any suggestions please?

Thanks,

Adam Hackett