Cinelerra: When YUV4MPEG fails with mencoder

Somewhere in the region of version r31061-4.4.3, a bug in mplayer and mencoder made the program not cache properly. This causes issues when trying to play streams, or when rendering an edited video in Cinelerra in YUV4MPEG-to-pipe mode.

The common behavior during rendering is that mencoder quits immediately or very soon, because it thinks end-of-file is reached, and very soon Cinelerra gets a SIGPIPE telling it nobody is listening to its output pipe. In the error log one gets

YUVStream::write_frame(utint8_t**): write_frame() failed: system error (failed/write)

A simple way to check if mencoder is to blame, is to try

$ mplayer < clip.avi

and then

$ cat clip.avi | mplayer - -cache 8192

If the first works, and the second doesn’t, you have the buggy mplayer.

This issue was solved on May 26th 2010, so just upgrade your mplayer/mencoder suite. For example, with version r31628-4.4.4 all works fine again.