Re: [SLUG] Torrent Question

From: Eben King (eben01@verizon.net)
Date: Mon Nov 27 2006 - 12:57:06 EST


On Mon, 27 Nov 2006, steve szmidt wrote:

> On Monday 27 November 2006 09:33, Eben King wrote:
>
>>> How often do you crash X, and what are you running?
>>
>> If mplayer gets a bad movie, or doesn't like my video card or something, it
>> might play a few ms of the movie and then hang on a black screen. Doesn't
>> respond to ctrl-alt-Fn, q, esc, or any other keystroke. Only solution I've
>> found is to log in remotely and do a "/etc/init.d/gdm restart".
>
> Wow. The only problems I have is when the disk is dirty.

No disk errors.

I use the binary driver from Nvidia for my "Personal Cinema" (which may
encompass a range of cards, but mine is a GeForce 4 MX 440). I've seen
other video-related anomalies -- when playing a movie with the "xv" driver,
it locked up occasionally, but with the "x11" driver, it didn't. Of course,
"x11" is deathly slow, so I had to use "-framedrop" to keep video & audio in
sync. But when it froze up, I unlocked it (sometimes by causing mplayer to
crash) by switching video modes. That method was unreliable, so I'd often
have to do it several times. It seemed to freeze more often when there was
lots of motion on the screen, but it froze once when there was nearly a
static image, so either that's not it, or there is >1 cause.

Hmm, gotta try that with other movie errors.

> I also noticed how various players deal better with reading them.

Noted.

> I tend to stick with FC.

Isn't that a distribution?

>> Hasn't crashed in weeks, since I learned to play all "dubious" movies
>> elsewhere. But I'm open to the possibility that it _might_, which is why I
>> run some stuff outside of X.
>
> I mainly use Xine to play movies.

I try all suspect movies in mplayer for XP on my laptop. They work
flawlessly there, which lends credence to the "bad video card driver"
theory.

-- 
I firmly believed we should not march into Baghdad ...To occupy Iraq
would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world
against us and make ... a latter-day Arab hero assigning young soldiers
to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator[.] -- GHWB
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