[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] problem with dspmp3sink

[From: Siarhei Siamashka]

On Monday 21 August 2006 10:32, Eero Tamminen wrote:

> > Also I noticed that gstreamer is not very reliable, at least when using
> > it from mplayer. It can freeze or reboot the device sometimes. That's not
> > something that should be expected from high level API. If I detect some
> > reliable pattern in reproducing these bugs, I'll report it to bugzilla
> > for sure. But right now just using mplayer and lots of seeking in video
> > can cause these bugs reasonably fast.
>
> First I would recommend using just "top" to see whether mplayer
> is either:
> - Leaking memory
> - Otherwise using too much memory
> Either by itself or forcing gstreamer to do that.
>
> If that is the case, the bug is in the mplayer (or gstreamer (plugin))
> and it needs to be fixed.  For debugging the leaks, I would recommend
> using Valgrind on x86.

Thanks for your reply and debugging advices.

Mplayer does not seem lo leak any memory as far as I tested it today.

Earlier I noticed problems with sound output getting blocked that could be
fixed by bult-in audio or video player. When trying to play anything it first
shows error message. After the second attempt either the sound got fixed or
the device rebooted. I suspected that something could get wrong with dsp and
standard  audio player is able to reset it. That was observed when using fdsrc
element for feeding data to the decoder in mplayer. On stopping/resuming
playback, probably partial audio frames could be feeded to mp3 decoder and
that might result in its misbehaviour.

Experimented with mplayer for a few hours today while preparing the next
release, but using fakesrc instead as described here:
http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/manual/html/section-data-spoof.html

Now only complete mp3 audio frames can be sent to dspmp3sink. Anyway, first
everything was ok and I even suspected that I will not encounter any problems
at all. But after a few hours I got several reboots. After the last reboot
even wifi started working strange (could not connect using ssh, it just showed
various errors). Turning the device off, waiting for a few minutes and
turning it on again got everything back to normal. Now I suspect that it
could probably be overheating or some other hardware problem (the device
worked with wifi on and heavy cpu usage because of decoding video for a long
time). I'll keep an eye on it and will report again if the problems keep
showing up and if their source becomes more clear.