[MPlayer-users] Resuming where I left off

[Jonas Jensen]

I use mplayer for controlling a big screen at a LAN party. Some times I
want to interrupt the movie to show messages using bmovl on a
pre-rendered background movie and then continue where I left off. Both
the main movie and the message background movie should be hardware
accelerated.

So my problem is finding a way to pause a movie, play another and then
resume the first one.

First I tried parsing mplayer's progress output (A:  xx V:  xx),
quitting mplayer, starting the new one and then resuming where I left
off with -ss. It worked most of the time, but when playing DVDs it
usually got it wrong -- the time counters seem to reset every chapter or
something on a dvd. Also, not all streams are seekable so this is not a
good solution.

I can't run two mga_vid or xv mplayers at the same time, but I can run a
fbdev:vidix and interrupt it by another fbdev:vidix. The only problem is
that the picture of the main movie is gone afterwards. This happens with
both mga and mach64 vidix drivers, so maybe it's a general vidix issue
that could be fixed?
When I try to run fbdev over a paused mga_vid or fbdev:vidix the fbdev
picture is behind the main movie, so that one's out too.

One solution I've found that works is to run the main movie with xmga,
pause it and then run the message background movie with dga. However I'd
prefer to avoid X11 and use framebuffer only.

Any ideas? I haven't mentioned what hardware I have because I should be
able to get pretty much anything that's required for this project -- so
don't hold back with hardware-specific suggestions.

-- 
Jonas Jensen <jbj at knef.dk>