On Sun, 2008-02-24 at 17:45 +0200, Uwe Thiem wrote: > On Sunday 24 February 2008, Florian Philipp wrote: > > Hi! > > > > I noticed a very annoying behavior. I've got a headless server > > (Athlon 64 X2) which primarily acts as a personal video recorder > > using mencoder and at-daemon. In its idle-time it's supposed to run > > a dnet-client. > > > > Then I've got a laptop (64bit Celeron, single core) on which I play > > those video files from my server over NFS. > > > > So far, so good. My problem is: Neither of them can handle > > recording/playing video while there is any background activity. > > That means I have to stop the dnet-daemon and suspend any emerges > > on my laptop. If I don't, both mencoder and mplayer loose sync of > > audio and video and drops frames. > > By dnet-daemon you mean dnetc, right? If you run dnetc with nice 19 > and simultaneously something that uses as much CPU as it can get > (like a fractals generator) at nice 0, you will see that dnetc still > uses around 6% CPU. But it does go down to 6%. The remaining CPU > should be enough for watching video. Disclaimer: I have never used > mplayer on a 64bit system. It might have issues there. > > Since you are playing the video over NFS you do so over the network. > Maybe a stupid question: You do use FastEthernet without any hub, > right? Switches are alright but hubs are evil. > > A possiible work around might be to increase the buffer in mplayer to > something around 1MB. > > Uwe
Yep, I meant dnetc (I thought dnet-client would be better understandable). And yes, it does go down but not far enough, especially because there are two such processes (one for each core). By the way: Another daemon who's causing problems is clrngd, creating 100% CPU-utilization every 4 minutes for about 1 minute. I neither use a switch nor a hub, just a good old crossover cable. In fact, I used to let mplayer create a 8MB cache but without background activity it was useless and with it, it's got eaten up too soon. Mencoder seems to utilize a queue/fifo/whatever-you-might-call-it by default but that doesn't help if it doesn't reach 25fps. Since nobody seems to have an idea, maybe someone can tell me how I allow processes with real-time priority (nice -n -20) to be started by an ordinary user? Of course I'm aware of sudo but I don't want a simple media encoder to have super-user permissions.
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