Bug 63005 – MPlayer picture stutters when the avi has ac3 in it -> major annoyance

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

[Description Sebastian 2004-09-06 07:00:15 UTC]

Hello all,

I have two computers. The first is an Acer Aspire 2001WLcI Laptop with a 1.4GHz Pentium-M cpu and 512MB DDR RAM. The second is a headless Box running VDR. The problem is that when I play a divx avi which has AC3 as an audio stream the picture starts stuttering. When I use mencoder to rip the AC3 stream out and play only the video it doesn't stutter anymore. 

The Laptop has an ATI 9200 mobile card with its own 64MB of memory. The card is accelerated with the xorg radeon driver in 2D. AGP 4x is enabled. DRM in the kernel is also enabled and working.

The headless box (VDR) is using -ao mpegpes -vo mpegpes in mplayer to display the video over the dvb card on the TV. 

On both computers CPU usage is around ~30% while playing the avi. On both I get the same results; the picture stutters with AC3 and doesn't stutter without AC3. 

If there's interest I can share my test.avi with and without AC3 with you so you can see for yourself. I'm almost sure you'll see the same behaviour like I do, because I emailed the avi to another user already and he experienced the same behaviour.

Quite remarkable is this: My TV can display both PAL and NTSC streams. So normally I wouldn't change the framerate from 23.976 to 25 like I would on a PAL-only TV. But if I do so (change resolution/framerate/speed) from NTSC to PAL the movie plays fine without the stuttering, even though mplayer has to calculate much more and cpu usage increases to ~45%. I can give you the different commandlines later if you want.

Thanks!

Sebastian

P.S.: Like I said: You want the test.avis I'd mail them gladly.

Sebastian

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Play a AC3 avi -> stuttering
2. Extract video only
3. Play video -> no stuttering
4. convert NTSC to PAL while keeping the audio and playback the movie -> no stuttering
 
Actual Results:  
AC3 included in avi results in stuttering

Expected Results:  
Playback should be fluent

[Comment 1 Sebastian 2004-09-06 07:01:02 UTC]

Oops,

I got mplayer 1.0-pre5-r3. Forgot to mention that :)

cu

Sebastian

[Comment 2 Chris White (RETIRED) 2004-11-08 23:15:57 UTC]

Yes, please to send a test .avi for me to look at.

[Comment 3 Sebastian 2004-11-09 01:44:02 UTC]

Hello Chris,

sorry, but that was quite some time ago and I already removed all divx stuff from my DVB box because it's no longer needed. And I don't have any DIVX movies left. I deleted them all.

Sorry

Sebastian

[Comment 4 Chris White (RETIRED) 2005-02-05 22:56:23 UTC]

mkay, well it works for me, so if you can provide a test case, please re-open.