[MPlayer-users] MPlayer hangs and 'beeps' when playing MPEGs

[Marc Packenius]

Me, again, straight from the Twilight Zone,

this is a problem that has been nagging me for several weeks now. I
didn't bother to report because it seemed to have started after
upgrading to Linux kernel 2.5.5x, but it didn't go away when downgrading
to 2.4.20.


The symptoms:

- video freezes

- audio plays high-pitched beep tone (maybe 8-12kHz, not sinus, more
  like sawtooth)

- status output in shell window stops, there is no error message
  whatsoever

- pressing a key in the mplayer shell window will resume playing without
  any problem, I usually simply use cursor-left to skip back a couple of
  frames; when running mplayer locally, even pressing the shift key will
  be enough to recover; I've seen it recover without interaction after
  waiting two or three minutes


I've seen this problem:

- over several weeks (it started last year) with several mplayer
  versions, incl. CVS-030118-03:44-2.95.4

- with NFS and local content (ie. content on local harddisk)

- only with MPEG *files*; I haven't seen it when playing AVI files, DVDs
  or DVB streams

- on two different machines (an Intel-powered notebook and a AMD-powered
  desktop PC)

- with -vo sdl on Rage Mobility and -vo fbdev on Matrox G450

- with a Maestro chip (ES1978, OSS), a Soundblaster 64 or 128 (OSS), and
  a SB Live 5.1 (OSS and ALSA);


It's not reproducible in the sense of 'play this file up to this
position and it will hang', but some files seem to trigger the problem
more easily than others. I cannot see any network problems and NFS is
working reliably for other applications.

Anybody ever seen anything like this?

Thanks for your patience,
-- 
Marc Packenius @ 4P | Zentrale Seitenauslieferung, Düsseldorf

Men are like... lava lamps.
Fun to look at, but not all that bright.