I'm having problem playing movie files with MPlayer. Picture and sound halts once in a while for moments (1/3-1 sec) while video is playing. I changed cache and audio/video settings to solve this, but so far no luck. It still abruptly halts once in a while (and randomly).

This didn't occur when I was playing files on my old laptop running on SuSE 8.0 with an old version of MPlayer (I believe it was ver. 0.90-rc4). Now I'm running SuSE 8.2, the current version(s) of MPlayer and it does this. Needless to say, I compiled from the source, and I'm NOT using SuSE's botched version.

As far as I know nothing is running in the background that might be causing this halt. This is strange, as MPlayer had been working just fine on my machines.

Any help would be appreciated....

Are you using also the codecs from the mplayer website?
Maybe you're running x11 decoder instead of xv and it is very slow, check for xv typing "xvinfo", if they are present, use -vo xv

Hope it helps

if you are running video from a drive connected to your
hard drive. ( on the same channel ), your hard drive syncs
can do that. maybe your cdrom isn't running in dma mode
also?

Hammett:
My system is running xv and mplayer's setting is xv as well.

whansard:
halt happens when I'm playing movie files from the hard drive. I haven't tried vcd or dvd yet. DMA is on, but it still halts. Maybe sync problem? How can I find out if that's the case?

Thanks.

by sync, i meant in reference to the hard drive buffers
flushing. disable sound and try playing like that for a
while and see if it pauses any. if it doesn't, try a different
sound output
mplayer -ao help