[MPlayer-users] System pauses when replaying

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 12:03:02PM -0800, Geoffrey Leach wrote:
> Configuration. Host is a Puget Systems Echo I, built on the Intel 
> DH77DF MB. It uses an Intel i7 3.1 GHz with 2 x Patriot Signature 
> DDR3-1333 8GB. There is a 100MHz connection to a Silicon Dust dual 
> tuner.

What do you mean by "100MHz connection"?? Is that a USB device?
What drivers does it use?

> What's going on. While the tuner is decoding and downloading OTA TV and 
> mplayer is replaying an MP4. the replay pauses for a second or so, 
> repetitively. As far as I can tell, there's no loss of playback.

What pauses? Audio and video together, at the same time?!
I'd consider that "impossible", it would have to somehow block the whole
audio driver chain to pause audio (MPlayer feeds usually the whole
upcoming second of audio data to the driver).
That is, unless it is actually the audio output that hangs and MPlayer
reacts to it by suspending the video.
Which could for example happen if a kernel driver hangs while holding
a lock.
A similar, but in the details different effect happens if your hard disk
is getting swamped, you should be able to see this by the cache getting
empty (assuming you run with cache enabled).
Whatever it is, since processes should not be able to influence each
other directly there should be going something wrong with a shared resource -
which might be a lock, disk bandwidth, memory bandwidth, DMA buffers,
...