[MPlayer-users] Unsolicited pauses

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 02:48:47PM +0200, Alexey Fuchs wrote:
> 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.
[...]
> 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.

Particularly for the crash I see no way it could be caused by MPlayer,
such things only hardware or kernel are supposed to be able to cause.
But for wild guesses: Maybe hardware overheating and thermal throttling
triggering? Maybe some kind of NTP server updating the local time in
a bad way, confusing MPlayer's timing code?
Which -vo are you using? Try a different one.
E.g. -vo x11 would cause the higher CPU load (problematic if overheating
is the issue), but usually one of the least buggy ones.
-vo xv often is fairly to extremely buggy nowadays, since it's emulated,
and often badly.
-vo gl can work very well, but it can cause high GPU load, particularly
with special settings, and it needs a quite large software stack to
work, so a lot of opportunity for bugs.
Playing without sound (-nosound) and seeing if it still happens might be
worthwhile, too.