mplayer eats memory and hangs

huhn_m · n00b Joined: 21 Aug 2006 Posts: 24

Hey there,

I have a problem with mplayer (r27725) running on a ~x86 system.

Whenever I try to play a file or stream (/dev/video0) with mplayer it seems to cache the whole file into memory. On MPEG2 streams my free memory is reduced by 1-2MB/s while on DIVx videos its about 100KB/s. At the same time caching goes up at a rate a little less than that. Mplayers OWN memory usage stays quite constant.

My problem now is, that the system trys to free up some of the memory eaten after a certain amount of time and while this happens the WHOLE system freezes for about 10 seconds. This makes watching videos basically impossible.

The same happens for MythTV and the video streams it gets from the TV-Cards (PVR-350) get corrupted because they are no longer read while the system hangs and ivtv complains because the stream is not read fast enough.

The Problem does (however) not seem to occur in xine since it does not seem to cache the video streams.

Can anyone help me and tell me how to prevent the system from forcefully freeing this much memory? This is my media center and basically it has been unusable for about 2 weeks now.

This occured first after a reinstall (~amd64 then) and I reinstalled the whole system again (~x86 this time) only to see, that it happens again.

Thank you for your help!

huhn_m

huhn_m · n00b Joined: 21 Aug 2006 Posts: 24

as a note: if I append "-vo null" to the command line of mplayer the wasting of memory stops. So it must somehow be related to video output and not to deoding.

Kryptonite · n00b Joined: 08 Jan 2006 Posts: 60 Location: London

can u illustrate on watching videos on /dev/video0 pls? is this a raw character device on your system? what happens if you play an avi file using mplayer? and is there particular reason y u are using an unstable maplayer version? I have used mplayer for many many years and never had a problem as such. please re-check mplayer use flags you have build against. something somewhere has gone wrong.

by the way -vo null disables the video output and it's the opposite of what you want
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huhn_m · n00b Joined: 21 Aug 2006 Posts: 24

i also tried the stable version with the same result. My whole system is running ~x86 so it is not unusual to have unstable mplayer builds

I could try mplayer bin..

THis also happens when playing files encoded with MPEG2 and DIVX. I have not tried others yet but expect the same result.

I just filed a bugreport that should contain all the important information:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=246152

/dev/video0 is a video4linux device linking to /dev/v4l/video0 (this is the tuner input of my PVR-350 analog TV tuner card). But as I said it is not limited to this input source. It also does NOT seem to be limited to mplayer sind mythtv behaves the same. Thats what puzzles me most ...

Thank you for your help!

*edit* I know that -vo null disables video output. It was to test if it is the fault of the decoder. Sadly mplayer changes the decoder from ffmpeg to mpegpes when outputing to the null devices so my above conclusion was wrong.

Kryptonite · n00b Joined: 08 Jan 2006 Posts: 60 Location: London

Have you tried using tvtime to watch tv?? have you checked if you are using the correct kernel driver (like bttv)? ususaly before it can be watched the device needs to be tuned in to a specific channel. years ago I used to have an analog Hauppauge tv card and have used mplayer successfully to watch and record live tele.

as far as mplayer goes it is very stable and very versatile, check your use flags again. may be it is the price u pay for being on bleeding edge.

_________________
"it's not the bullets; beauty killed the beast"

huhn_m · n00b Joined: 21 Aug 2006 Posts: 24

hm ... it is not about the TV card (IMO) since it works with xine. Drivers are of course loaded and tuning works just perfect.
This would also not explain why the same happens while playing simple MPEG2 files (DVDs!!!)

I only mention mplayer because it is easier to diagnose problems with it since it is more verbose. However, I want to use mythtv and this one does not work either. TVTime is not an option since this is a mediacenter PC and should offer more then just TV.

Also keep in mind, that the latest version of mplayer IS in fact marked stable! (http://www.gentoo-portage.com/media-video/mplayer) So it is not about being on the bleeding edge!

and my useflags don't seem too exotic either:
3dnow 3dnowext X a52 alsa dvd iconv ipv6 mad mmx mmxext mp3 opengl sse sse2 theora truetype unicode v4l v4l2 vorbis win32codecs x264 xscreensaver xv xvid

...