PM123 Troubleshooting

1. The player says that no matching decoder plug-in is available when playing files without standard extensions.

   By default PM123 tries decoders only if either the file extension is known to work with this decoder or the file type is listed in the file type list of the matching decoder plug-in in the configuration dialog.

   • Either add one of the file types that the file has in the file's properties dialog to the list of known types for the matching decode plug-in or
   • check the box 'Try unsupported file extensions and types too' for the desired plug-in. But note that this can significantly degrade performance when examining large playlists.

2. International characters (e.g umlauts) of MPEG Audio files show as garbage.

   There are encoding problems with the ID3 tags. Either the settings in the MPG123 configuration are bad or the tags itself use nonstandard encodings.
   ID3V1 tags do not have a well defined encoding. ISO-8859-1 is common, because a similar one is used by WinXX, but around the world there are almost all encodings used in ID3V1 tags. Have a look at the MPG123 configuration and activate the auto detection.
   ID3V2 tags do not support OS/2 standard codepages and they never have done so. So if you tagged the files with an OS/2 application (including PM123 1.32) it is very likely that the tags have been written in an OS/2 codepage. This should be cured. You may set the read encoding for ID3V2 to the matching codepage and use a Unicode format for writing ID3V2 (I recommend UTF-8). Once you rewrite the tag with PM123 it uses no longer a non-standard encoding.

3. The player does no longer get the total playing time and uses very much CPU.

   Maybe the engine is busy for some reason. Press Alt+Shift+I in the main window to open the Inspector Window. The section 'Worker Queue' will show what is currently going an. Maybe you have touched some links to large or non-existing items, that take longer to be analyzed. Especially links to large, remote folders are considerably slow. You also might adjust the number of worker threads in the configuration dialog.

4. The player skips and/or the audio doesn't sound right.

   There might be multiple reasons if you encounter this problem. Some of them are listed here. First of all, check your MP3 file. It may be broken. It might play successfully on another player, but mpg123 may not necessarily like it. If you think it's not related to the input stream, maybe the problem is one of these:

   • You have a polling device driver (for example, a very old 2x CD-ROM or PRINT01.SYS without /IRQ switch)
   • You have a video card that supports 'automatic PCI bus retry', but your motherboard stops processing during those retries. Disable the feature (video driver).
   • You have an ATI Mach64 and you are experiencing a bug in the video driver using software mouse pointers (i.e. colored mouse pointers).
   • You have a process that hogs all the CPU. Get a CPU monitor (we recommend CPUMon) and a process killer from hobbes.nmsu.edu.
   • Your CPU is too slow (or overheated). We recommend you have at least a Pentium II machine.
   • You have outdated, old or buggy sound drivers. This is a common problem. Many sound drivers out there for OS/2 just plain suck. We have tried to test PM123 on as many drivers as we can, but some drivers are incomplete and/or buggy.

5. The player crashes on startup.

   • You have an old MPG123.DLL (or some other DLL PM123 comes with) in your LIBPATH. Or you tried to start different versions of PM123 from different directories at the same time.
     Set LIBPATHSTRICT=T to get this working. (Requires recent OS/2 kernel.)
   • Your system doesn't support DIVE (Direct Video Extensions). Try renaming visplug\analyzer.dll to something else.
   • PM123 might dislike a file that you used the last time, or the settings might be broken. Try removing the PM123.INI to restores all setting to the default.

6. My mouse cursor is jerky or jumpy!

   • You have a bad video driver. You should try SciTech Display Drivers also known as SNAP which should fix all your problems. If this does not work out, we cannot help you more on this matter, but we urge you to call/mail your video driver manufacturer about this problem.
   • You have a colored or animated mouse pointer that is not supported properly by your video driver. They are software mouse cursors and they don't mix very well with high performance multimedia applications that draw rapidly to the screen. SDD drivers do not exhibit this problem. Switch back to the old black and white OS/2 default mouse pointer and/or disable pointer animation. The default b/w pointer is a hardware mouse cursor. This problem is often caused by all high speed DIVE applications.
   • If all fails, one way to fix this problem is to set analyzer disabled by default (Properties -> Plug-Ins -> analyzer.dll -> Configure). Of course you won't see the cool graphics then.

7. The analyzer and the timers stop working after long playbacks.

   This is a bug in some sound drivers that prevents MMOS2 to return playing times beyond 2³⁰ samples. This is after about 6 to 7 hours at 44 to 48 kHz sampling rate.
   If you activated 'retain playing position on stop' press the play/stop button twice and the sound device is reinitialized. This gives you another 6 hours. ;-)

None of the above

If you think there is something wrong with PM123, you may send a bug report.