Re: [gentoo-user] I want to play movies without hangs [SOLVED, sort of]

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org> wrote:
> Finally, I found something. It's Dolphin!
>
> I've done some longer testing, always playing the same video parallel
> with a dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/10G bs=1M count=10000, in mplayer, for a
> minute, several times. When I do this by opening the file in Dolphin, I
> get about 15 interruptions, some for longer than a second. Started on the
> command line, there are very few, I can play the video for minutes
> without a gap. Hooray!
>
> In KDE, I usually play videos by opening them in Dolphin. I exchanged
> 'mplayer %U' by 'xterm -T MPLAYER -e mplayer %U' in the settings, now
> mplayer runs in a terminal, and all is fine. I created a window rule so
> the terminal automatically minimizes. Cool!
>
> It only happens in mplayer and mplayer2. Other players work fine, but I
> like mplayer best, and prefer to run it without any window decoration.
>
> Now, would this be an MPlayer problem, or one of Dolphin?

I wonder if Dolphin is generating thumbnails/preview indexes at the
same time you're trying to play, causing resource contention. I wonder
if you can disable thumbnail generation by Dolphin or remove the
association it has with video files and mplayer.