[MPlayer-users] Strange behaviour of latest mplayer when seeking

[Vladimir Mosgalin]

Hi everybody.

I updated mplayer to one of later builds, r33183. It has two strange
strange things about it. First is, spitting
[VD_FFMPEG] DRI failure.
few times per second on console on media files. A bit annoying, but it
doesn't give any bad effects. On some files, there is just one message
like that at start of playback, but on some, it goes non-stop. On some
it works okay. Mostly old encoded mpeg and divx videos seem to be
affected, "freshly encoded" and h264 material is fine.

Anyhow that's a minor thing, just felt like mentioned it, maybe it's
fixed in later versions already.


Another, more serious problem is that it doesn't allow to seek in file
properly. Say, I start video and press "right arrow" to seek forward,
10 seconds seek is bound to that key. Mplayer seeks for 2-3 minutes then
stops. No errors or strange messages even with -v when it stops. Now I
depress button, press it again, and it seeks again for a minute or few -
and stops again.

If i seek backwards, mplayer usually (maybe always?) seeks properly
without stopping. When I start seeking forward after seeked backwards,
it stops soon again.

Moments where it stops aren't constant. This behaviour is unrelated to
key-fifo-size setting. It feels like it can be related to cache; i.e.
when cache is exhausted, there is some chance that next seek won't
happen and mplayer will ignore button that is still pressed until I
leave it and press once more. But this is just my opinion, I might be
well wrong.
This behaviour gets worse (stops more often) when seeks get smaller or
bitrate of video gets higher, i.e. "seek +2" can produce this effect
always, "seek +10" mostly and "seek +60" only on high-bitrate videos.
On very small bitrate videos, this effect is never observed.

Another way to increase chance of this happening is using big cache and
big cache-min. With my default, -cache 65536 and -cache-min 5 it happens
often. With -cache-min 5 -cache 4096 it seems to never happen. With
-cache-min 50 -cache 8192, it happens. It also happens with -nocache,
btw.

At times - really rare - this stop is accompanied by
Cache not filling, consider increasing -cache and/or -cache-min!
message. But most stops give no message.

Mplayer playbacks videos perfectly, it simply stops seeking as if I was
to depress button, even though it's still pressed.

No options other than cache related (and seek size and video bitrate)
seem to be related to the problem.


-- 

Vladimir