[MPlayer-users] Re: annoying error-message

[D Richard Felker III]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2003 at 11:30:03PM -0500, Jonathan Rogers wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Attila Kinali wrote:
> >Well, infact there are no false positives.
> >MPlayer prints this messages when it would have to drop too many packages
> >(ie when the internal counter reaches a certain number).
> >The point is, if the movie is just playing at the limit for some time
> >and later uses less cpu, so mplayer can recover A-V sync, you wont
> >even realize that video was lagging behind audio.
> 
> That's exactly what I mean about false positives. The great majority of 
> the time, I can ignore the message because MPlayer will recover within a 
> second or two. The result is that I always ignore the message and it is 
> meaningless to me. If I notice that my CPU usage is at the top for at 
> least five or ten seconds and/or there are very large jerks in the movie 
> continuously, I know there is an IO or CPU problem. I'd agree that 
> message is too Winozey because it's not specific enough. It'd be better 
> if it said something like: "Had to drop x frames."

It doesn't drop frames (unless you use -framedrop, in which case you
shouldn't see the message unless your system is super-slow/broken).
The message appears when A-V desync remains above a certain threshold
for a certain amount of time. RTFS for the numbers; I forget what they
are. Prolly something like 0.5 sec.

Rich