[MPlayer-users] Re: mencoder crashes entire system daily

[Jonathan Rogers]

Tobias Diedrich wrote:
> MPlayer is not the cause but the catalyst. Realtime encoding stresses
> the system a lot and if it crashes the whole system it means that your
> hardware is flaky. Maybe bad RAM chips or the CPU overheating...

It could also be a kernel bug, though I'd suspect the hardware. I've had 
a similar issue with a sound device (VIA 686 sound). Simultaneously 
recording from it and playing back audio on either the same device or a 
different one in the same machine (ES1371) will bring the system down 
after a seemingly random period of time. Simply recording from the same 
device doesn't seem to trigger the behavior.

Jonathan Rogers