[MPlayer-users] Unexpected quasi-pause when switching desktops

[The Wanderer]

On 2022-08-29 at 13:55, Reimar Döffinger wrote:

>> On 29 Aug 2022, at 16:25, The Wanderer <wanderer at fastmail.fm>
>> wrote:

>>> I don't think much changed in MPlayer, so if it's a regression
>>> I'd think compositor/window manager/GPU driver to be a more
>>> likely cause than MPlayer to be honest...
>> 
>> Seems likely, yes. Doesn't rule out the possibility of being able
>> to find a way to change MPlayer to correct for it,
> 
> Ah, right, the solutions question. I was only looking at the "figure
> out what goes wrong" question so far. A really good solution would
> need really understanding the problem first.

Inevitably and necessarily so, yes.

> But if it's vsync or lack of GPU resources I would have thought that
> -framedrop should work. Have you tried that?

I have now, along with (per your earlier suggestion) '-vo
gl:swapinterval=0'. Neither made any apparent difference.

My current guess/suspicion is that something about my larger
rendering-stack config (possibly even the underlying driver itself) now
does detection of whether or not the display surface is currently
visible and scales back the rendering resources allocated to it if it
isn't, and this is an unavoidable side effect of that.

As I said, I don't think the possibility of MPlayer being able to do
something differently to compensate for such an environment is likely
enough to justify the effort resources we'd need to invest to even
verify whether it's possible at all, not given the extremely limited
scale of those resources currently available.

> Some people might not want to use it, for example if you are
> sensitive to frames being dropped incorrectly. But I would think for
> most users it's a good option to use anyway.

It's documented in the man page as being for the benefit of (and, by
implication, only offering any benefit for) slow computers - where
"slow" is presumably relative to the needs of video being played and the
display output involved - so I've been omitting it on the basis that
this is not in any way a slow computer.

I know there are contexts in which I can notice the results of
framedropping, but I'm not sure whether it would be prominent enough to
be a reason not to use the option. I'll take this under consideration as
things move forward.

-- 
   The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.         -- George Bernard Shaw

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