(Sorry, sent this to mplayer-users by mistake!) Hallo! I'm developing a multimedia frontend program, and I wanted to be able to let the user use mplayer (if installed) as one of the backends. However I can't seem to build a commandline and call mplayer from within my own program! For example, this simple program: #include <stdlib.h> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { system("/usr/local/bin/mplayer -vo null -quiet -framedrop /mymediafiles/fred.mpg >/test.log"); return 0; } Examining test.log (from the above) shows that mplayer parses the mpg file OK and gets as far as starting to play, but crashes everything (the keyboard is locked up, and I can't Ctrl-Alt-Backspace out of X, can't switch to another terminal, but the OS is still running underneath - I can connect via ftp). If I run mplayer from an xterm with the identical command line it works fine! Can someone try the above program, of course replacing the path with some video file on your own system, and see if it is possible? Or maybe offer some suggestion as to why it behaves so strangely? :)