I have an interesting mplayer problem. When using the time seek function after a certain time mplayer exits. To clarify:

The film starts at 35 minutes without a problem, changing the time to 40 mins however...

causes mplayer to exit. No error message is given on the terminal output. This problem only occurs with certain DVDs, and does not seem to relate to the version or distro (currently I'm using mplayer 1.0pre8 on Ubuntu, but I have had the same issue on earlier self-compiled versions running slackware). Incidentally, I can watch the entire DVD without problems, and seek while the film is playing, only the command line seek function is failing me.

Example problem DVDs (all UK releases):

Shadow of the Thin Man
Mission Impossible II

I presume this has something to do with the structure of the DVD, but I've no clue what to look for.

Any ideas?

mplayer developers call it a feature... it's done this sort of stuff since day one. you may wish to browse the mplayer-users email list, but there's no fix we can suggest...

I was thinking of filing a bug report: I've been looking for a bug report following the links from the mplayer website, but haven't found the appropriate one. Do you know if such a one already exists? From what you say it sounds as though this, er, feature is already well known. In that case, should I not file a bug report?

Many thanks for the reply.

well i did have a look through the code myself once to see what it was all about. they cite the way that the data strcutures are held within the dvd itself, which to some extent does seem to be correct, but only because they use a very strictly generic way of access data like that across different media types. if they were to implement a specific way of access DVD timing data then it would work fine. i can see their resistance to doing that, but it still leaves a nasty issue within one app which does exist anywhere else.