[MPlayer-users] mplayer suddenly does not recognize keyboard input

[Alayne McGregor]

I'm hoping someone can help me with an abrupt change in mplayer behaviour. 
I RTFMd and googled but couldn't find anything related to my problem.

I'm running MPlayer2 2.0-701-gd4c5b7f-2ubuntu2.

I use mplayer to play mp3, flac, and wav files (mostly mp3), from the 
command line on my Ubuntu 14.04 system. I mostly am transcribing the 
files, so I need to stop and start frequently and seek backwards and 
forwards.

Up until this morning, it worked perfectly and was very useful.

This morning, when I played the mp3 file I was working on last night, the 
audio played fine but mplayer didn't recognize _any_ normal keyboard input 
(except CTL-C). I also got an error which I hadn't seen before: "Dead key 
input on file descriptor 0".

I hadn't changed any of my mplayer options or setup.

Late last night after I finished my work, I did a standard update on my 
machine, updating
- the kernel to 3.13.0-65-generic
- python-software-properties to 0.92.37.3
- libcuda1-340 to 340.76.0ubuntu0.1, 340.93.0ubuntu0.1
- nvidia-331 to 340.76.0ubuntu0.1, 340.93.0ubuntu0.1
- nvidia-340 to 340.76.0ubuntu0.1, 340.93.0ubuntu0.1 (plus several other 
nvidia packages)
- software-properties-kde to 0.92.37.3, 0.92.37.5
- software-properties-common to 0.92.37.3, 0.92.37.5
This is all that I changed on my system.

If I run
mplayer -v --no-consolecontrols file.mp3
the fd0 error no longer appears and the characters are echoed (i.e. a 
space shows up when I press the space bar), but mplayer still takes no 
action in response to the keypresses.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour before? Is there any workaround, 
please?

Alayne