[MPlayer-users] Re: Mplayer as a Client for VideoLAN server

[Rett Walters]

Ross:

>What's probably happening here is that packets are getting lost (probably
>because you're trying to stream over a LAN that's not sufficiently
>high-bandwidth).  Unfortunately MPlayer's MPEG decoder library is not very
>robust; it can crash if it encounters missing data in the middle of a MPEG
>stream.
>
>If you save the incoming stream to a file (using "-dumpvideo"), you'll
>probably find that MPlayer will crash - in the same way - if you later try
>to play that file.  (The good news, though, is that will give you a
>repeatable way to produce the crash - which should help people debug the
>problem.)
>
>         Ross.
>


It may be do to data loss, but its not because of my network (I am a data comm eng
by profession) - Its based on a $4K Cisco 2924M/XL 10/100 Ethernet switch with a
non-blocking 3.2Gbit/sec backplane (not some cheap Best Buy LAN switch), and the
machines are using high quality NIC cards, and each have Ghz Class CPU's and the
NICs are optimally configured for speed/duplex.  I regularly get 75-80Mbit/sec
throughput between machines, and remember Xine and Videolan's client play these
streams across the network without a hitch - Video/audio is perfect, no skips or
jumps or losses.

Xine and VideoLAN Client are very good players, except I need something that is
easily scriptable.

Unfortunately xine does not work real well from a command line only enviroment, and
VLC doesn't have the output device support I need (DXR3) - So I am left with Mplayer
as my only other option....

If there is data loss - I would attribute it to mplayer or the rtp code - has it
been tested with streams of 8Mbit/sec or more?

I will see if I can "Dump the video" as you suggested.

Thanks,

Rett