This isn't really a tech. question about packages, but is about a NetBSD
package (mplayer).  I figure netbsd-help is probably the best place for
this, but it only beats out tech-pkg by a nose.

I had the need to update pkgsrc and rebuild some stuff.  Fortunately, in
the avalanche of resulting package rebuilds, everything built.  Unforunately,
mplayer no longer works quite right (it was one of the packages that got
rebuilt).

It works okay for perhaps up to the first hour, say, then starts to get
jumpy/glitchy and shortly exits/crashes.

If I restart and skip ahead to get back to where I was, I might get another
15 minutes of play.  Then skipping to where *that* crashed I get perhaps
5 or 10 minutes...it goes steadily downhill.  This makes it very hard to
see a movie to completion.

The behavior is a little like what happens when I don't use framedrop and
the audio gets so far ahead of the video that it fails.  However, I *am*
using framedrop (and the problem occurs even if I use hardframedrop, now;
there is no out-of-synch problem with audio anyway, so I don't think that
that's the real problem, it just acts like it).

Because it can't keep perfect synch with 100% of the frames, my guess is
that it is using up some finite (or not properly freed) resource whenever
it has to resynch.  (This would explain why it gets worse and worse for
later and later in the movie; unfortunately, I can't see how to skip to
N percent or N minutes into the movie, so there's no way to just restart
"the second reel" neatly; each successive failure requires more manual
skips to get back to where I was.)

I tried various -ao and -vo mplayer options.  One of them (I forget
which; an audio driver option, I think) seemed to let me play the movie
without lossage but resulted in *continual* audio skips that made the
whole unacceptable.

I'm now using ogle.  I am not sure that it's quite as good in general,
but it has a much better full-screen frame-rate.  I'd kind of rather go
back to mplayer.  The one downside to ogle is that it causes some video
artifacts due to bugs in the XFree86 driver and/or the S3Virge video
card I have.


Anyone have similar experiences to share?  Are there any suggestions
about ways to twiddle options to mplayer to make it work again?
(I got about 18fps with the "old" mplayer, which was not ideally smooth,
but acceptable to me.  The rebuilt mplayer would be a lot better for
short movies (up to about an hour, maybe) by getting apparently close
to 24fps, but for general movies it is just not acceptable anymore due
to eventual crashes/implosions.)

Oh, the CPU is an Athlon 800MHz, and I'm running a pretty generic
1.6 system with a custom kernel.  The only other thing (that shouldn't
matter as far as I know) is that the computer exports an NFS mount or
few.  (But the NFS activity is low in general.)


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/