[MPlayer-users] Bug (or not) with printer

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Sep 08, 2002 at 04:38:05PM +0200, H du Plooy wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Hello,
> 
> Firstly, thank you for a great program.  In 15 years of
> computing, MPlayer is by far the most wonderfully crafted
> software that I have encountered!
> 
> Problem:  MPlayer's console output gets sent to my printer
> too.  I'm using MPlayer0.90pre7, compiled with gcc 2.95.3
>  This has happened only twice though before I switched the
> printer off, but I haven't been able to reproduce it.  I
> haven't changed anything though.  It happened once with
> 0.90pre6 too, but never before that.  Not a major issue, I
> just thought you'd be interested.

Are you running it in some sort of xterm? If so, the xterm's
"hardcopy" mode probably got turned on somehow, perhaps by cat'ing a
binary file to it or something similar. See if you can find the docs
about this in your terminal emulator's documentation, and disable this
dumb feature, or else don't send bogus binary data to the terminal.

(Note that it's possible that the bogus binary data was printed out by
MPlayer itself -- for instance if the file you were playing has header
info or a filename in a bad encoding like shift-jis (MS Japanese
encoding) that uses control characters to encode text. Try redirecting
all output to a file with "mplayer blah.avi > mplayer.log 2>&1" and
then load this file afterwards and see if it has binary data/control
chars in it.)

Rich