[MPlayer-users] mplayer + heavy io: why ionice doesn't help?

[Corey Hickey]

The Wanderer wrote:
>> I noticed that mplayer's video playback starts to skip if I do some
>> serious copying or grepping on the disk with movie being played from.
>>
>> nice helps, but does not eliminate the problem. I guessed that this
>> is a problem with mplayer failing to read next portion of input data
>> in time, so I used Jens's ionice.c from Documentation/block/ioprio.txt
> 
> (Where is this path located? It certainly isn't part of the MPlayer
> source tree.)

In the Linux kernel source, it seems.

>> I am using it this:
>>
>> ionice -c1 -n0 -p<mplayer pid>
>>
>> but so far I don't see any effect from using it. mplayer still skips.

This is the first I've ever heard of ionice, but ioprio.txt mentions 
that CFQ is the only I/O scheduler that supports priorities. Are you 
using CFQ?

Besides that though, the usual solution to heavy I/O causing skipping is 
to use -cache, just like The Wanderer advised.

-Corey