[MPlayer-users] video buffer full on new SATA drive

[Jaime Alberto Silva]

I have added the buffersize tv option and now it works. Even if I use the
minimum 16MB buffersize it works fine. I guess there's something wrong with
the default dynamic buffersize.

I'm sorry I forgot to specify my system and mplayer-mencoder version. I'm
running Debian GNU/Linux testing/unstable and here is the version
information:

jaime at sgautomatizacion:~$ mplayer --version
Unknown option on the command line: --version
Error parsing option on the command line: --version
MPlayer SVN-r29142-4.3.3 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team
jaime at sgautomatizacion:~$ dpkg -l | grep mplayer
ii  mplayer                               1.0~rc3+svn20090405-1       movie
player for Unix-like systems
ii  mplayer-doc                           1.0~rc3+svn20090405-1
documentation for MPlayer
ii  mplayer-skin-blue                     1.6-2                       blue
skin for mplayer
jaime at sgautomatizacion:~$ mencoder --version
MEncoder dev-SVN-r26940 (C) 2000-2008 MPlayer Team
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.93GHz (Family: 15, Model: 4, Stepping: 9)
CPUflags: Type: 15 MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
Compiled with runtime CPU detection.
--version is not an MEncoder option

Exiting... (error parsing command line)
jaime at sgautomatizacion:~$ dpkg -l | grep mencoder
ii  mencoder                              1:1.0.rc2svn20080706-0.1
MPlayer's Movie Encoder



Jaime Alberto Silva Colorado
Gerente
SG Automatización Ltda.
Pereira \ Risaralda \ Colombia
http://www.sgautomatizacion.com


On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 12:18 PM, Jaime Alberto Silva <
jaimealbertosilva at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello everyone!
>
> I need help with a problem I'm having since I migrated a system from an IDE
> drive to a new SATA drive.
>
> The old drive was an 80GB IDE Drive that came with the machine, a Compaq
> SR1717LA.
>
> I've been upgrading the machine since I bought it, now it has 1GB RAM (I'm
> about to buy it the other GB, it only supports 2, 1 per slot), it also has
> a  KWorld V-Stream Studio TV Terminator card for TV and analog video
> grabbing.
>
> I have been using mplayer to watch TV and my own script + mencoder + cron
> to record TV shows.
>
> Everything was working fine until this week I installed a new 500 GB Maxtor
> SATA II disk and migrated the hole system there. I did that because the IDE
> drive has now about 4 years been used for recording and I'm afraid it will
> die soon, so I plan to keep using it to store the TV shows until it dies and
> then buy a new one. Howerer, since I want to be sure nothing is missing in
> the new disc I'm going to keep the old disc untouched for a few weeks, so
> everything is running on the new disc now.
>
> Here comes the problem, now when I run mplayer to watch TV or mencoder to
> record I keep getting this message:
>
> video buffer full - dropping frame
>
> And recordings and TV watching are bumpy, what I mean is it keeps stopping
> and jumping forward.
>
> Googling about it all I found is on this mail list and says that it happens
> when DMA is off, so I checked and also found that SATA drives always have
> DMA on, here is the info I get for the new drive with hdparm:
>
> # hdparm -i /dev/sda
>
> /dev/sda:
>
>  Model=Maxtor, FwRev=HA431DN0, SerialNo=H8120TDH
>  Config={ Fixed }
>  RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
>  BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=16384kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
>  CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=976773168
>  IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
>  PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
>  DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
>  UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 udma6
>  AdvancedPM=yes: disabled (255) WriteCache=enabled
>  Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-7 T13 1532D revision 0:
> ATA/ATAPI-1,2,3,4,5,6,7
>
>  * signifies the current active mode
>
> As you can see it is running in UDMA5. As a reference I looked at the info
> for the old drive:
>
> # hdparm -i /dev/hda
>
> /dev/hda:
>
>  Model=HDS728080PLAT20, FwRev=PF2OA28A, SerialNo=PFD215S7S7S0BM
>  Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
>  RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=51
>  BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=1719kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
>  CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=156301488
>  IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
>  PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
>  DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
>  UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
>  AdvancedPM=yes: disabled (255) WriteCache=enabled
>  Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-7 T13 1532D revision 1:
> ATA/ATAPI-2,3,4,5,6,7
>
>  * signifies the current active mode
>
> As you can see both drives run with UDMA5 (remember /dev/sda is the new
> drive and /dev/hda is the old drive).
>
> I also ran speed test for both drives. Here is the output for the new one:
>
> # hdparm -tT /dev/sda
>
> /dev/sda:
>  Timing cached reads:   1030 MB in  2.00 seconds = 514.92 MB/sec
>  Timing buffered disk reads:  198 MB in  3.01 seconds =  65.73 MB/sec
>
> And this is the output for the old drive:
>
> # hdparm -tT /dev/hda
>
> /dev/hda:
>  Timing cached reads:   1032 MB in  2.00 seconds = 515.74 MB/sec
>  Timing buffered disk reads:  174 MB in  3.02 seconds =  57.60 MB/sec
>
> To me, it seems both have similar performance, so I don't get why I'm
> having this "video buffer full" problem.
>
> As for the file systems, the old drive has a mix of primary and logical
> partitions in ext3 and xfs for home. For the new drive I'm using a primary
> partition of 100MB in ext4 for /boot and in the other partition I put an LVM
> VG with LVs for /, /usr, /home, /var, /publico and /pruebas all of them with
> ext4 format.
>
> Can someone please tell me what is wrong?
>
> Thanks a lot.
>
>