[MPlayer-users] Re: [BUG] Lock up when resuming after long pause on removable media

[Jonathan Rogers]

Adam Nielsen wrote:
> This bug has been in mplayer for ages and it can be really annoying.  When I 
> play a file direct from CD (either unmounted with -dvd or mounted and playing 
> an actual file from the CD) if I pause mplayer for long enough, then my DVD 
> drive spins down and upon resuming playback mplayer plays out the rest of the 
> buffer (~1 sec) and then locks up at the point where the CD/DVD should spin 
> up again.  I have to use kill -9 to get out of it, and I get a message saying 
> it received the signal in 'seek'.  I can then run mplayer again which spins 
> up the drive and starts playing again fine (but if the drive spins down again 
> the same problem occurs.)
> 
> Has anyone else noticed this problem?

I haven't had that exact problem, but mplayer will die sometimes when 
trying to read a movie from a marginal CD-R. What you describe probably 
isn't fair to blame on MPlayer. MPlayer was waiting on the "seek" libc 
or system call when you killed it. Maybe you were just impatient. :) It 
may have taken several minutes before the kernel gave up and returned an 
error, so I might have killed it as well. Perhaps a more robust design 
would have a timer in a separate thread or process or use non-blocking 
IO calls to avoid those long waits, but I don't think it's currently a bug.

Jonathan Rogers