[MPlayer-users] Unsolicited pauses

[Alexey Fuchs]

Dear List Members,

I have a mildly irritating problem running mplayer that since I
installed Fedora 19 with kernel 3.11 on a Dell 3450 with Intel
integrated graphics.

The problem is that mplayer would stall/pause during playback randomly
- say, two or three times in one hour, sometimes more - for about 3-5
seconds. Then playback resumes normally. It usually happens as I watch
stuff fullscreen on a projector, but I do not think this has anything
to do with the last fact.

There is no correlation as far as I can tell either with the file size
and resolution or with disk/processor activity. I have witnessed this
problem with .mkv, .avi and .mp4, 30Mb to ~2Gb in size, 540 to 1080p.

There are no direct error messages (unless they've been put in some
logs that you're going to point out to me). I tried to use the -v
switch, but it only produced waves of irrelevant data.

A couple of times I tried to extend or end the pause by hitting
spacebar or "p", and it appears that any keyboard input during these
curious fallouts causes a full system crash: the system stops
reacting, I cannot kill the session and even the keyboard backlight
stays on indefinitely.

It is quite possible that the problem has nothing to do with mplayer,
which only acts as an indicator, but I'd still have your learned
opinion on the matter.

Please enlighten me. I will be happy to provide any information that
might help diagnose the problem.

Thank you in advance,
A. Fuchs