annoying freevo/mplayer speedup

mr-simon · Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 11:42 am Post subject: annoying freevo/mplayer speedup

Hi,

I have the following setup:

Attic - one Gentoo fileserver, large hard disk, movie collection exported via NFS
Living room - one Gentoo freevo box, tiny hard disk, movie collection mounted over NFS via ethernet

The problem I have is that when watching movies on the living room box, occasionally (avg. once per hour of viewing) the video speeds up drastically for about 10 seconds, with everyone running around like lunatics. The audio stays fine. Then the video freezes, while the audio catches up with where the video has got to. Then the video starts up again, slow-motion for a couple of seconds until everything is back in sync.... And then it continues fine.

Any ideas why this is happening?
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~L~ · Posted: Thu Mar 16, 2006 9:59 am Post subject:

I have the same problem. Although I have only one PC running freevo (on top of kde) on the projector and kde on the monitor. Sound goes through s/pdif. (I have ~amd64 in my make.conf.)

Sorry, that I don't have a solution, but it does not seem like playing the movie from the NFS share is to blame.

bgradid · Apprentice Joined: 21 Mar 2005 Posts: 162

I've had the same problem
I thought it was something to do with the fact I was running on a laptop with speedstep
but I've been playing over an NFS share as well

mr-simon · Posted: Mon Apr 03, 2006 12:54 pm Post subject:

ahubu · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 7:45 pm Post subject:

You could try to give mplayer the "-cache 8192" parameter somehow (I'm not sure if freevo allows you to add parameters to programs). When watching movies over my wlan it helps a great deal on nfs shares. I used to have stutters, but now it's gone. Another thing that could help is this in your fstab of the freevobox:

DooBeDooBeDo · Apprentice Joined: 21 Aug 2002 Posts: 220 Location: UK

My Mythtv box started doing this after I got my DVB stick, it's an EPIA SP1300 (net boot with NFS root, no HD) so pretty low powered. I traced it to happening when mythbackend was getting schedule updates over DVB and was grabbing pretty much all the CPU. I was surprised at how frequently it updated. I changed to getting schedule updates using xmltv and it went back to normal. Don't know if this'll help...

mr-simon · Posted: Sun Dec 09, 2007 9:09 pm Post subject:

Okay, this is still happening, and it's pretty much driving me crazy.

I've been using the same system for a long time, although due to hardware failures and upgrades I've replaced *all* the hardware in the box (gfx, processor, ram, mobo, hdd, psu) and done a complete gentoo/freevo reinstall from scratch.

I've tried playing files locally, and they still cause problems so it's nothing to do with the NFS.

I grab my xml TV listings at night, just as the last poster suggested, and I've tried messing with my cache settings for mplayer, from nocache up to lots.

If it *is* something else hogging the CPU, I don't know what it could be. Nothing else is scheduled to run.

The problem is still the same:

ahubu · Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 4:56 am Post subject:

Hmm, sounds weird. It could still be some cronjob running hourly, or something like that. In addition to your crontab (which you already checked), you could check the cron.d directories in /etc. They contain scripts for various system utilities that might be installed (like that blasted updatedb that brings my whole system down to a crawl at 4am

). It could for instance be the ntpd daemon which tries to sync the time, but is having a tough job doing so (for instance, over a very slow wlan connection).

Most certainly you won't find anything there (since you probably already checked). Then you could check if it is the cpu by giving mplayer realtime priority. just renice it to -18 (or something like that). An alternative is to emerge the wonderful program "verynice". In the config you can set mplayer as a "priority" application, which will automatically renice it to -4 (or something else, if you wish) at startup.

Furthermore, make sure mplayer is using a hardware-assisted video output driver like xv, xvmc, gl(2). And particularly not x11, since that eats up a lot of cpu (and makes my mediacenter stutter too, athlon 1600+).

In the harddrive department, make sure dma is on with hdparm. But that is almost certainly the case already.

Another possibility that I can think of is that you are (still?) using an incredibly lousy videocard, somethings like a very old pcicard (trident,cirrus) with only 1 or 2mb of ram onboard. That might cause the occasional stutter (and you would be forced into x11 video output in mplayer anyway).

Since you didn't seem to have replaced the soundcard (onboard?), it might be some sound trying to play while you watch the movie, and without hardware mixing and no proper amix settings it might cause a stutter. But I'm reaching out here.

Just trying to give you some ideas, there are probably a lot more small things you could investigate.

Good luck! :roll:

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