[MPlayer-users] Problem: some videos freeze, other very similar videos do not--difference might be just in resolution (pixels)--how to convert?

[Randy Kramer]

On Tuesday 18 October 2011 02:44:33 am houghi wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 05:20:36PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> > The very cheap NVIDIA 8400GS card (they even come fanless!), the
> > nvidia binary driver and libvdpau will make your machine a lean,
> > mean video-playing machine (if, of course, it's not a laptop...) no
> > matter how slow the CPU is.
>
> Full ack. I have an 8400GS with 1920x1200 and a 8600 GT with 1920x1200 and
> 1920x1080 screen and run 3 seperate 1080p movies from HD without any
> problem.

Thanks, Ron and houghi!

I'll almost surely do that in my next system (but that may be a while).

That also gave me the clue to find out what vdpau was (Carl had suggested I 
try an option something like -xo vdpau (just going from memory) and I didn't 
understand (until now) why that didn't work.

By the way, in a private email to me, Carl suggested using something like 
=ffmpeg -in <infile> <outfile>.avi to convert the troublesome videos, that 
did work (they now play properly in mplayer--perhaps a little more pixelated 
but that is better than seeing just a frozen first frame of the video).

If anyone thinks it would be of benefit, I can send a copy of one or more of 
the problematic videos in case somebody wants to dig into why I had the 
problem.  

I didn't mention it before, but typically it also takes longer for the 
problematic videos to start--it seems to me as if it takes longer for mplayer 
to recognize the format of the video or something.  

Note that the videos are (to me) fairly long, on the order of 30 MB. But the 
videos that work properly are the same length or longer.  In fact I have one 
around 75 MB that works fine every time.

Randy Kramer