Arch Linux

gaabster

Member

Registered: 2017-09-28

Posts: 12

[SOLVED}Mplayer, mpv and youtube strage behaviour.

Hi.

I am observing some strange behaviour on my rather fresh arch install and I would appreciate any help in diagnosing/fixing it so let me explaing what is going on.

First there is a problem with mplayer and playing youtube videos. If I have a video playing in mplayer and I try to play a youtube video in a browser it just won't play. But as soon as I exit mplayer the youtube video works as is should. After this the playback in both mplayer and browser works as it should.

Now another thing that I just can't seem to fix is mpv stopping video playback after few minutes of playback for some reason. The sound keeps on playing but the video stops, it looks like a frozen frame. If I exit fullscreen the video starts playing but then it stops again after few min when I go back to fullscreen. I was thinking that maybe it's the screensaver/dpms settings. I don't have any screensaver installed. I did set

xset s off
xset dpms 0 0 0

in .xinitrc.

As far as I can see vlc works without any problems.

I am on Lenovo e480 with i3wm.

Thanks for any help.

Last edited by gaabster (2018-04-11 13:26:06)

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: [SOLVED}Mplayer, mpv and youtube strage behaviour.

First there is a problem with mplayer and playing youtube videos. If I have a video playing in mplayer and I try to play a youtube video in a browser it just won't play. But as soon as I exit mplayer the youtube video works as is should. After this the playback in both mplayer and browser works as it should.

Do you have the same issue with every web browser?

gaabster

Member

Registered: 2017-09-28

Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED}Mplayer, mpv and youtube strage behaviour.

Do you have the same issue with every web browser?

Good question. I forgot to add it only happens when using Firefox. I can scroll through the video but it won't play until I close Mplayer. So it's a combination of mplayer and ff.

I should also add that I didn't try installing any other codecs except gstreamer and the ones that come with vlc/mplayer. Does mpv come with any codecs?

Last edited by gaabster (2018-04-10 20:54:35)

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: [SOLVED}Mplayer, mpv and youtube strage behaviour.

I'm assuming you have plain ALSA setup without any additional sound servers.

Make sure you're using the same alsa output device with mplayer, as with the other video players without the audio issue.

Also, my understanding is that firefox's ALSA support can be quirky, so you could try pulseaudio/apulse if nothing else works.

I should also add that I didn't try installing any other codecs except gstreamer and the ones that come with vlc/mplayer. Does mpv come with any codecs?

Generally anything you might need are already installed as dependencies, or listed in optional dependencies of each package. Anything else should at least be mentioned in wiki

For your mpv issue, try different vo= options, and switching off anything else that could effect video output (e.g. hardware acceleration).

gaabster

Member

Registered: 2017-09-28

Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED}Mplayer, mpv and youtube strage behaviour.

Well you were right it was a sound server issue. Firefox was using pulseadio and mplayer was going for alsa. Adding

ao=pulse

to mplayer config solved the issue. I also checked if installing

pulseaudio-alsa

pulgin works and it does.

As for the mpv problems i'll try it as soon as I have some free time and report back.

Thank you and have a good day.

gaabster

Member

Registered: 2017-09-28

Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED}Mplayer, mpv and youtube strage behaviour.

Ok so It looks like

hwdec=no

fixed the issue with mpv. I'm not sure why hardware decoding doesn't play nice with my laptop.

Thank you for all your help ooo.