Opened 12 years ago

Closed 12 years ago

Last modified 12 years ago

#2063 closed defect (worksforme)

cache not responding - performance issue

Reported by: mario.natiello@… Owned by: reimar
Priority: normal Component: ad
Version: 1.0rc4 Severity: normal
Keywords: Cc:
Blocked By: Blocking:
Reproduced by developer: no Analyzed by developer: no

Description

When playing audio CD:s mplayer empties the cache without refilling it.
This leads to choppy playing, in my case 1 second music + 1 second silence...
This problem has been tracked down to be a bad matching with cdparanoia caching
method but I can't confirm this, not being an expert.
There is a workaround (to increase cache and min-cache up to the size of the
track).

I want to protest against declassing this problem to a "performance issue" and
against being happy with the workaround. It is a fact that the cache-refilling
is not working properly under certain circumstances (not working with audio-cd,
but no problem is seen for e.g. much larger avi-files on disc or for
mp3-files). To increase cache beyond the size of the file is of course a
workaround but of the depressing sort. Mplayer should be able to do better
than that.

I have 4096 cache and minimum filling 50%. Mplayer takes half a minute to
fill the cache, then it plays about 25 seconds, until cache is empty, then
one second music followed by one second silence:

mplayer cdda://

MPlayer dev-SVN-r34866-4.6-openSUSE Linux 12.1 (x86_64)-Packman (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team
Can't open joystick device /dev/input/js0: No such file or directory
Can't init input joystick
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing cdda://.
Found audio CD with 19 tracks.
Cache fill: 0.00% (0 bytes)
Track 1
Cache fill: 49.92% (2093280 bytes)

rawaudio file format detected.
Cache not responding! [performance issue]
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [pcm] Uncompressed PCM audio decoder
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 1411.2 kbit/100.00% (ratio: 176400->176400)
Selected audio codec: [pcm] afm: pcm (Uncompressed PCM)
==========================================================================
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Video: no video
Starting playback...
A: 24.6 (24.6) of 4370.2 ( 1:12:50.1) 0.9% 3%
Cache empty, consider increasing -cache and/or -cache-min. [performance issue]
A: 25.6 (25.6) of 4370.2 ( 1:12:50.1) 1.8% 1%
Cache empty, consider increasing -cache and/or -cache-min. [performance issue]
Cache empty, consider increasing -cache and/or -cache-min. [performance issue]

Change History (2)

comment:1 by reimar, 12 years ago

Resolution: worksforme
Status: newclosed

Please provide evidence this is an issue in MPlayer.
There was an issue with cdparanoia caching that made it impossible to use with -nocache, but this has been worked around.
I have absolutely no issue playing CDs currently using cdparanoia (using the current Debian unstable version of it).
However there are some combinations of it and CD drives where it gets nowhere even close to realtime extraction speed (it needs about 10 seconds to read a single second of audio data - this is reproducible even with other programs, including their own "cdparanoia" binary).
This seems to be the case for you, but there is absolutely nothing we can do on the MPlayer side about it, it is a cdparanoia bug, and "performance issue" in this case is a performance issue in cdparanoia extraction speed.
Anyway if you use -nocache you should see that this message is just a side effect and has nothing to do with the cause of the problem, nor with the cache in general.
There is a good reason libcdio is now the default library for CDDA, cdparanoia is so full of bugs using it is just a pain that's not worth it.

comment:2 by mario.natiello@…, 12 years ago

Hi
Building mplayer with --disable-cdparanoia (at the ./configure stage) solves
the issue. By googling this issue I failed in finding a clear official
instruction in this respect. It may be in the mailing lists of mplayer, but
it did not percolate down to Google yet.
I suspect that this disabling is *not* set as default by Mplayer. For example,
Packman builds Mplayer for OpenSuSE *with* cdparanoia. This is probably because
Packman makes as default build, which has cdparanoia enabled.
I vote for disabling cdparanoia per default.

  1. Natiello
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