[MPlayer-users] video buffer full - dropping frame

[Ivo]

On Saturday 12 August 2006 21:32, giorgio wrote:
> Hi to everybody.
> I'm trying to record a movie captured by Hauppage WinTV USB but I get a
> lot of frames dropped and the output is actually a "sobful" motion
> picture. I'm disappointed 'cause I have a good pc (Athlon 64 3200+, 1500
> MB Ram DDR, 120 GB HDU for system (debian Etch) and 160 GB HDU for data)
> and I can't believe to get such kind of problems from mplayer/mencoder. I
> tried also to compile mplayer from sources, but nothing has changed. Down
> here the command string and the output related.
> Thanks in advance,
> Giorgio.
>
> giorgio at neo64:~$ mencoder -tv
> driver=v4l:device=/dev/video1:input=2:width=320:height=240 -oac copy
> -ovc copy -mc 0 -o movie.avi tv://

With -ovc copy, the amount of data is somewhere between 5.5-7MB/s. Maybe dma 
is switched off on your harddisk? Try man or google on hdparm.

Also try specifying a framerate and maybe a buffersize (-tv 
fps=25:buffersize=64 see man mplayer). Capturing to MJPEG will reduce the 
strain on your harddisk. Use -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg for that.

Enabling low-latency and kernel code preemption also helps for multimedia 
applications, but I don't believe that should be necessary. I have done 
years without it.

--Ivo