[MPlayer-users] Re: Random pause while playback?

[Jonathan Rogers]

Bob Cheng wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> Dear Jonathan:
> 
>  I totally agree what you have said. Can you teach me how to troubleshoot
> this skipping problem? I don't see any meaningful console message by 
> myself.
> My CPU loading (by top) is only 60%-70%, I have tried several different 
> mpeg2
> and divx movies, and different sound drivers (oss, alsa, 
> alsa-oss-emulation)..

In my experience, if MPlayer needs all of the CPU time for playback, 
there aren't really pauses, but the playback just gets jerky. I would 
guess it's an IO throughput problem somewhere. The first thing is to 
make sure MPlayer is using a large enough buffer. Try "-cache 8192" if 
there isn't already a large buffer. Make sure DMA is enabled on the 
drive from you're playing. Try copying the movie or part of it to a 
faster drive

I know very little about MPlayer internals, since I'm just a user. One 
of the developers may be able to give more insight.

Jonathan Rogers