Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryoujin
For some reason I've noticed that any format (either KMV or AVI, low or high quality) starts lagging after watching several files, this happens in two computers I got (iMac 2.16 GHz with 1GB of RAM and a MacBook Pro with 2 GB of RAM).
It's ok at the start, but after watching several episodes, lets say 5, sometimes they randomly lag. At first I thought it was my computer but it shouldn't be happening in the other computer (it has better specs than mine), plus, it also happens with low quality AVI files. This lag doesn't happen with QuickTime+Perian nor VLC, maybe it's some sort of memory leak?
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Open your Acitivity Monitor and look at your "inactive RAM" as you play those files. It steadily builds to a point where there is no free RAM eft, and instead of being forked over to be used like it should at that point, it forces the system to start making page-outs like crazy, resulting in bad performance. I first noticed the problem when I ran MPlayer on Leopard, and it happens with both GUI and commandline versions. No one on the mailing list seems to acknowledge the problem as existent until I bring it to attention, and the best response I've gotten so far has been a claim that it's "okay" because some other random program does the same thing (though I can kind of see why no one wants to deal with the problem; Mplayer was made as a viable option on Linux originally, and OS X is the only platform that has to deal with "inactive RAM" vs. "free RAM" nonsense in the first place... just means that MPlayer is a bit crippled on OS X Leopard for things like marathoning several anime episodes, etc.).
Until someone commits an Mplayer patch (or I have enough free time to actually look at why MPlayer but neither VLC nor Quicktime+Perian do this despite using the same codecs...), I've employed the solution of once every so often running a shell script that dumps the bulk of inactive RAM and produces an output file by abusing the "du" command. It's a pretty simple script that's equivalent to typing just one line in Terminal:
Code:
#!/bin/bash
du a -> du -sh
Bear in mind that if you create a script that does this, you should make sure you give it the appropriate permissions to execute on double click, etc. You'd accomplish in Terminal this with:
Code:
chmod +x shellscript.sh
where shellscript.sh is whatever you named it.