[MPlayer-users] mencoder TV Capture - video buffer full

[David Frey]

>> After I run the command, I can see my memory usage rising quickly in
>> gkrellm.  Once the memory is almost all used up, this error is printed
>> over and over quite quickly "video buffer full - dropping frame".  I
>
> This is the video buffer filling, exactly what the message says. Mencoder
> will use a lot of memory buffering (half physical memory). You
> can adjust it with the 'buffersize=' option.

Now that you mention that, I suppose the memory wasn't filling up
completely.  When I started mencoder, I had a bit of memory usage and then
it started saying the buffer was full before I reached 100% usage, so I
guess it was just using half of my physical memory.  The question is then,
why is my buffer (presumably 256 MB) filling up so quickly without any
encoding happening as shown here?
Writing AVI header...
Pos:   0.0s      1f ( 0%)   0fps Trem:   0min   0mb  A-V:0.000 [0:0]

Thanks,
David Frey