[MPlayer-users] MPEG-TS becomes increasingly sluggish (long delays before pausing/seeking)

[Adam Nielsen]

Hi all,

A few months ago one of my local TV stations (SBS HD, Australia, 720p) changed 
something in their broadcast, and since then it has become increasingly 
difficult to watch their transmissions.

I record them to disk as a raw MPEG-TS stream, and when playing back these 
files (from a local disk) it all seems fine initially, but if I try to seek or 
even pause, there is a long delay before this happens.

For example, if I watch for two minutes and then press the space bar to pause 
playback, it might take a couple of seconds before playback actually pauses. 
But if I watch for 10 minutes before pausing it might take 30 seconds before 
mplayer responds and pauses playback.

If I leave it long enough without pausing, seeking or otherwise interrupting 
playback, eventually the video will start 'stuttering', where the sound and 
picture will momentarily stop (for less than a second) once every few seconds. 
  Nothing unusual is shown in mplayer's output.

Pausing or seeking is enough to get things back to normal for a few minutes, 
but often once this point has been reached it's very difficult to continue 
watching as it doesn't take long to start stuttering again.  Other channels 
(i.e. different MPEG streams) don't have this problem.

Has anyone else experienced this problem?  Are there any options I could try 
to experiment with to see if they have any effect?  I've tried various -mc 
values and lowering -cache but it didn't have much effect.

Thanks,
Adam.