[MPlayer-users] playing / pausing a growing media file without restarting

[David L. Emerson]

On Sat 26 Nov 2011, Ingo Brückl wrote:
> David L. Emerson wrote on Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:09:43 -0800:
> 
> > So I tried the graphical gmplayer, but gmplayer is even more stupid: If 20
> > seconds of content have been downloaded when gmplayer is started, then even
> > if the download speed is faster than the playback speed, gmplayer stops
> > playing at that 20 second mark. It's like it makes a copy of the file as it
> > exists when playback is started, instead of accessing the file (which is
> > growing ... command-line mplayer doesn't seem to have any problem doing
> > this)
> 
> The graphical gmplayer doesn't behave that way (and doesn't make a copy).
> It passes the filename to mplayer which basically does then what the
> command-line mplayer would do.

Well, conjectures of *why* it is doing what it is doing aside, this is what I am 
observing. If it's a big download or slow connection, I will have to restart 
the media several times, and have gotten into the habit of just waiting until 
the darned thing has finished downloading so I don't have to have viewing 
interrupted.

I am using debian oldstable with (I believe) Marillat's mplayer, which is an svn 
snapshot from mid-2008. Is it possible that this older version behaved this 
way?

(Sorry I neglected to include that info in my first post)

I used lsof and compared the outputs of mplayer vs gmplayer and the substantive 
difference was that gmplayer was using a few pipes, whereas mplayer was not:

COMMAND    PID  USER   FD   TYPE     DEVICE     SIZE      NODE NAME
gmplayer 17963 david    5r  FIFO        0,6           13452904 pipe
gmplayer 17963 david    6w  FIFO        0,6           13452904 pipe
gmplayer 17964 david    5r  FIFO        0,6           13452904 pipe
gmplayer 17964 david    6w  FIFO        0,6           13452904 pipe

Thanks!
~David.