On Sunday 24 February 2008, Florian Philipp wrote: > Hi! > > I noticed a very annoying behavior. I've got a headless server > (Athlon 64 X2) which primarily acts as a personal video recorder > using mencoder and at-daemon. In its idle-time it's supposed to run > a dnet-client. > > Then I've got a laptop (64bit Celeron, single core) on which I play > those video files from my server over NFS. > > So far, so good. My problem is: Neither of them can handle > recording/playing video while there is any background activity. > That means I have to stop the dnet-daemon and suspend any emerges > on my laptop. If I don't, both mencoder and mplayer loose sync of > audio and video and drops frames.
By dnet-daemon you mean dnetc, right? If you run dnetc with nice 19 and simultaneously something that uses as much CPU as it can get (like a fractals generator) at nice 0, you will see that dnetc still uses around 6% CPU. But it does go down to 6%. The remaining CPU should be enough for watching video. Disclaimer: I have never used mplayer on a 64bit system. It might have issues there. Since you are playing the video over NFS you do so over the network. Maybe a stupid question: You do use FastEthernet without any hub, right? Switches are alright but hubs are evil. A possiible work around might be to increase the buffer in mplayer to something around 1MB. Uwe -- Informal Linux Group Namibia: http://www.linux.org.na/ SysEx (Pty) Ltd.: http://www.SysEx.com.na/ -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
