[MPlayer-dev-eng] Ignoring errors on CDROMs

[Jan Knutar]

> > > I know that setting file_readahead on /proc/.../settings helps,
> > > but isn't there anything more that can be done in order to make
> > > mplayer behave similar to the hardware players?
> >
> > I'm quite sure there is, just noone wrote something like this for
> > mplayer :)
>
> What exactly could/should be done for this ?
> How does such an error correction work ?

It seems to work pretty OK for me on [S]VCD with mplayer on Linux, that 
is, I get a pretty explosion of macroblocks in psychdelic colours on 
heavy scratched areas :)
 I don't know how hardware players functions, never fed one a scratched 
disc that I remember, although Playstation2 seems to think every other 
disc is bad, and freeze for 5 minutes, then say the disc is bad. That's 
probably not a hardware player, though.

I'm guessing the OP was refering to reading from Data cd's though... In 
that case the drive is probably trying a few hundred re-reads of bad 
sectors, and linux tries the whole thing again 8 times... Someone 
discovered that there was a bug in the cdrom code somewhere too, which 
meant that Linux would retry too many times, the guy projected reading 
an entire scratched data cd to somewhere around a million years. That'd 
be fixed in recent versions though, and now you can expect hours 
instead of years, yay.

The best thing to do with damaged data cd's, would probably be to dd the 
data from it to HD first...

Hm, would mplayer abort on read errors reported by the OS, or retry with 
the next X bytes instead?