[MPlayer-users] Memory Leak in mencoder

[Reimar Döffinger]

Hello,
On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 08:40:49AM +0100, Rácz János wrote:
> I've found an annoying bug in mencoder.
> 
> I use mencoder with my tv-tuner card in this way:
> 
> mencoder -tv 
> driver=v4l2:norm=PAL-BG:chanlist=europe-east:saturation=100:width=768:height=576 
> -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=xvid:vbitrate=900 -oac mp3lame -lameopts 
> cbr:br=128 -vf crop=720:544:24:16,pp=lb -o ~/film.avi tv://
> 
> It was a perfect method with Ubuntu Feisty. I installed Ubuntu Gutsy and 
> with this method mencoder "had eaten" 1 GB RAM in 1 minute. If I use 
> vcodec=mpeg4 it takes about 5 minutes.
> 
> I've tried it with the last Subversion and also with an older version of 
> mencoder (from MPlayer-1.0pre8.tar.bz2 
> <http://www.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/MPlayer-1.0pre8.tar.bz2>) and 
> the result is the same.

This is already a strong indication that the bug is probably not in mencoder.

[...]
> ==6287== LEAK SUMMARY:
> ==6287== definitely lost: 1,355 bytes in 12 blocks.
> ==6287== possibly lost: 46,445 bytes in 1 blocks.
> ==6287== still reachable: 3,295,304 bytes in 3,471 blocks.
> ==6287== suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.

And actually this says quite clearly that mencoder leaked at most 47 kB
of memory.
If course it might tell the kernel driver to do something that causes it
to eat memory (though in my opinion that would be a horrible design for
a driver), but unfortunately the valgrind info does not really help here
:-(

Greetings,
Reimar Döffinger