[MPlayer-users] Prevent mplayer from playing immediately in slave mode

[Jörn Reder]

Hi,

I like to preload a video, viewing the first frame, pause it and start 
playback later.

I use mplayer's slave mode to control this, which works basically, but I
encounter some detail problems.

In particular mplayer always starts playback, as well in slave mode, 
even if I send a pause command immediatly. I use it like this:

  mplayer -slave filename.avi

and feed the following commands right after startup to mplayer's STDIN

  pausing osd 0
  pausing seek 0 2

Later I send

  pause

to start the playback.

Not only the video starts playback on startup, on each slave command 
(even with "pausing") video playback starts over again for a few frames,
which is really bad and not what the user expects (at least me ;). Once
the player is in "pause" mode, no command except "pause" or "play" 
should change that! One just changes the volume: mplayer starts 
playback. Why?

In particular with audio, you hear the first audio frame, and I didn't 
get it managed to mute mplayer's audio output during startup, even with
-softvol, sending volume commands etc. (muting the master is no option 
for me, because there is more playback ongoing in parallel)

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Jörn