[MPlayer-users] Ignored heartbeat-cmd command

[Vincenzo De Florio]

Dear all,

I have been trying to use the -heartbeat-cmd to actually have mplayer
send a heartbeat to another task -- a watchdog timer waiting for UDP
messages on a certain port. To do so I used the following command line
with MPlayer Sherpya-SVN-r28311-4.2.5:

    mplayer -heartbeat-cmd "/usr/local/bin/sendHeartbeat localhost 2>
    /dev/null" myfile.avi

The above line renders myfile.avi, though the heartbeat command is
completely ignored. I tried other variants, e.g. via ~/.mplayer/config ,
but still with the same result. So I tried with

    mplayer -heartbeat-cmd "echo try this > trythis.txt" myfile.avi


Same result: no trythis.txt was written. I read from the manual that
there's nothing that special with the heartbeat options, simply mplayer
executes a system(), so really I can't understand why the commands seem
to be simply ignored.

Thank you very much!

Kind regards,

Vincenzo De Florio

P.S. I'm also sending this message to Mplayer-dev-eng .