Re: mplayer: jumping around

[JoeHill <joehill@teksavvy.com>]

Liviu Andronic wrote: 

> Recently I encountered this nasty, aggravating behaviour in mplayer:
> moving the computer (say, creating a little vibration by knocking on
> the table, or simply moving a muscle when on my laps) will cause
> mplayer to scroll forwards or backwards (any of the available 10 or 60
> sec, or 5 min). At times it continues like this until the
> end/beginning of the file. Many times it seems to appear randomly,
> perhaps on earth quakes or when a heavy truck passes in the
> neighbourhood.
> 
> I suspect that the behaviour is caused by the accelerometer that
> should be present on the notebook, the one that should catch
> out-of-norm accelerations, shut down the hard drive and prevent data
> loss. I was once curious on how this works on Linux, and installed
> couple of packages similar to hdapsd and hdaps-utils. Since I removed
> these, without any change in mplayer behaviour. As a final note,
> mplayer looks like the only misbehaving application. Oh, and all this
> happens on an HP Pavilion dv3.
> 
> Any ideas on how to work around this issue? Thank you

This is a long shot, but mplayer sometimes does that to me in a
relatively minor way because the mousewheel moves slightly without me touching
it (my mouse is kinda old).

Is it possible that the scroll pad on your laptop is being activated by shocks
or vibrations? Is there some way you could temporarily disable the touchpad and
test it?

Anyway, like I say, this is a totally wild guess, but the problem did sound
somewhat familiar to me.

Another thing to try is to run mplayer from a terminal and see if the output
gives you any hints as to what's happening in the background.

-- 
J