[vox-tech] mplayer bug?

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Tue 20 Jun 06, 11:32 PM, Hai Yi <yihai2004 at gmail.com> said:
>    Hello,
> 
>    I've installed mplayer but it appears to be buggy, or maybe its learning
>    curve is a little too much :-(
> 
>    Here is the problem - I wanted to play a rmvb file, and first receive
>    this:
> 
>    Failed to open /dev/rtc: Permission denied (it should be readable by the
>    user.)
> 
>    question: what's /dev/rtc? how can a normal user have the access to it?
 
/dev/rtc is the device file abstraction of your computer's real time clock.
You may want to briefly scan "man rtc" for more info.  Many games, mplayer,
and audio stuff relies on it for accurate timing.

The answer of how to access it is pretty much the standard answer to many
"how do I access X" type questions: use groups.

I don't remember if I did this or if Debian did this, but my /dev/rtc is
group owned by "audio" and has read/write access for group ownership.  Add
your local user to the audio group.  You do that by editing (as root) the
file /etc/group so that the audio entry looks like:

   audio:x:29:hai

then log out, and log back in, and you'll be in the audio group.  This will
give you access to the rtc.


Also, do an 'lsmod' and make sure the rtc driver is loaded.  If you don't
see it loaded, look in /proc/config.gz and see if the rtc driver is built
right into the kernel.  If you don't see it in either lsmod output or in
/proc/config.gz, load the rtc module using "modprobe -a rtc".

Finally, you may want to put this in your rc.local script:

   echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq

which sets an upper limit on the number of interrupts generated by rtc.
Note I use:

   echo 8192 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq

since 1024 was giving me problems with playback of some movies.




>    Ok, I su-ed to be root, the permission issue is gone, the video clip went
>    on for about 20 sec, then came this:
> 
>    debian:/home/hai# mplayer Entertainments/pulp_fiction.rmvb
>    MPlayer 1.0pre8-3.3.5 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team
>    CPU:    Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 - M CPU 2.20GHz (Family: 15, Model:
>    2, Stepping: 9)
>    CPUflags:  MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 0 3DNow2: 0 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1
>    Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 SSE SSE2
> 
>    Playing Entertainments/pulp_fiction.rmvb.
>    REAL file format detected.
>    Stream description: Audio Stream
>    Stream mimetype: audio/x-pn-realaudio
>    Stream description: Video Stream
>    Stream mimetype: video/x-pn-realvideo
>    Stream mimetype: logical-fileinfo
>    VIDEO:  [RV40]  960x540  24bpp  30.000 fps    0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
> 
>    ....
> 
>    AO: [oss] 44100Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
>    Starting playback...
>    VDec: vo config request - 720 x 480 (preferred colorspace: Planar I420)
>    VDec: using Planar I420 as output csp (no 0)
>    Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
>    VO: [xv] 720x480 => 854x480 Planar I420
>    A:  20.8 V:  20.8 A-V: -0.000 ct:  0.001 367/367 29%  9%  2.1% 4 0
> 
>    MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: decode_video

oopsie!

>    - MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.
>      Recompile MPlayer with --enable-debug and make a 'gdb' backtrace and
>      disassembly. Details in
>    DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports_what.html#bugreports_crash.
>    - MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
>      It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
>      gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
>      DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't
>    and
>      won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible
>    bug.
> 
>    Any suggestions? Or do I really have to re-install it as it hints?
 
When you say "re-install", I hope that doesn't mean you installed from
source!   Remember, you have Debian packaging at your disposal.  But for
this case, you might want to consider

http://www.debian-multimedia.org/

pete