[Freevo-users] mplayer pauses (freezes) for a 5-10s

[Ivan Pantovic]

This is a quite weird loking problem .. and anoing too...   I'm building freevo on a Shuttle SP51G with P4 Celeron 1.7 and 256 Mb RAM 120Gb HDD and so on ... VGA is Matrox G400 and the picture is excellent using directfb on a second head. I'm also using PCTV tuner with his IR remote and it's working like a charm (dough i have a conflict with some commands from my samsung tv remote but that just need ironing out)   problem manifestation is:   while movie is playing ... picture (and audio) pauses for a moment, then breefly after some time (it is sometimes 2s or 10s there is no pattern) start playing again after obvious resinhronization (video starts fast and then slows down until sync with audio, audio continues normaly) then everything is fine for a while (again it is never the same ammount of time .. 20-30-40minutes then it happens again)   i noted so far that CPU usage for mplayer while this is happening sky rocket to full 99% CPU usage. (that is only what i could find out)   What i tried so far:   First my guess was mplayer and his way of fine time sincronization. I tried turning of the RTC timer, (using soft timer then of course disabling it completly). After that I suspected the onboard SiS chipset and integrated audio i810 ac97 so i pulled out my PCTV card from the other PCI slot and inserting SoundBlaster Live it happens again. Then i returned to mplayer and tried out some things like using Alsa instead of OSS, using SDL for audio output like mplayer documentation suggested. After a while i realised something else .... hm .. maybe cpu termal throttling lower cpu speed and that causes mplayer to use it so much .. I tryed no-hlt, noapic apic off .. and so on... I also tryed to monitor temperature when pause occurs nothing and then i noticed it.   When i run mplayer from a cmd line it never happens .. only while i'm playing video from freevo gui. Why!? What is so different when i start it from freevo? What causes mplayer to use 99% of CPU and how to debug it? Mplayer logs show just desync .. nothing else .. , what causes mplayer to pauses?   Is there anyone else that is having this exact problem and how to workaround it?