Re: mplayer + heavy io: why ionice doesn't help?

[Jan Engelhardt]

>> > > >It helps. mplayer skips much less, but still some skipping is present.
>> > > 
>> > > Try with -ao alsa, then it should skip less, or at least, if it skip, skip 
>> > > back so that less audio is lost.
>> > > When playing audio-only files, it is always wise to specify e.g. -cache 320
>> > > which proved to be a good value for my workloads.
>> > 
>> > Only with the very latest versions of mplayer does ALSA work at all.
>> > It's unusable here because it resets the auduio stream on each underrun
>> > rather than simply ignoring them.
>> 
>> I'm not sure that I ever got an underrun (may check it
>> for you if you need that, how to do it?),
>> but mplayer -ao alsa is working for me just fine.
>
>You probably don't get underruns because your machine is fast.  Mine is
>a 600Mhz Via board, but I know this is an mplayer ALSA driver bug
>because it works perfectly with -ao oss, and because mplayer's ALSA
>driver maintainer has acknowledged the bug.

Good to hear. mpg123 and ogg123 all behave nice (without nice, ionice, or 
other priority adjustments) even under disk load.


>I think the problem is also due to mplayer's faulty design.  It should
>be multithreaded and use RT threads for the time sensitive work, like

Heh sounds like you need MplayerXP.

>all professional AV applications and many other consumer players do.




Jan Engelhardt
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