[MPlayer-users] mencoder often COMPLETLY locks up my machine

[Diego Zuccato]

Matijs van Zuijlen wrote:
> Have you tried to telnet into your machine? Did it work?
Tried. Didn't work :-(

> Have you tried compling support for the magic sysrq key in the kernel?
Done.
> That may help to kill runaway processes.
Nope. COMPLETETLY locked means it doesen't get sysrq, too. :-(

> Are you running X when you run mencoder?
Usually, yes. I'll try again from console, but I doubt it changes
anything.
> Does running mencoder exhaust memory? At some point the kernel will
> start killing other processes to free some memory. I had some mysterous
> lockups in the past that were probably related to that. Strangely,
> upgrading my BIOS solved that problem.
Uhm... Could be really strange... vcd movie is just 49MB, and I have
128MB... I'm just a bit low on disk space, but it shouldn't matter (btw,
it's about 400MB free... 8 times the movie I'm going to encode...). And
shouldn't the kernel start swapping ? killing processes should be just
in case the kernel itself needs more memory. And how could mencoder make
the kernel need more memory without even being suid root ?
I can't upgrade the BIOS (Acer doesen't release updates).

BYtE,
 Diego.