[MPlayer-users] TV-recording with mencoder, "video-buffer full"

[The Eye]

Hi list.

I searched through the list-archives and also googled through the docs
and didn't find this anywhere so I hope it is OK asking here.

I often record stuff from my saa7134-based TV-card with a command like:

mencoder tv:// \
 -tv driver=v4l2:width=768:height=576:amode=1:adevice=/dev/dsp1 -oac \
 mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=96 -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
 vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2000 -vf crop=698:558:12:2,scale=640:480,pp=lb /
 -endpos 1:00:00 -o somefile.avi


btw if anything about this is stupid, please tell me.

Anyway, 9 times out of 10, this works just perfectly. But once in a
while, I get lots of errors like
Video-buffer full, dropping frame

and in the resulting file, audio and video are _badly_ out of sync (like
20-30 seconds out of sync).

Questions: what is the cause of this? What exactly does "video-buffer"
in this context mean? Is it some part of the tv-card or something else?
Because in this case nothing should go via video-card, or am I wrong?

And of course: what can I do to stop this from happening?

As far as I can tell, nothing that is a drag on CPU or memory is running
on this machine whilst running the recording, I even make a point of
stopping X before starting the recording ...

-- 
Michael Hellwig  aka  The Eye                 olymp.idle.at admin
check out http://homepage.uibk.ac.at/~csaa5128 for gpg public key
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