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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.
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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 allmost 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.
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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.
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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)
- Bad CD-ROMs tend to seek the disk often. This usually
takes 100% CPU and halts I/O operation until the drive completes the
seek. You can try cleaning the CD.
- 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.
- You have Full Window Drag enabled. It sucks 100% CPU
power when you use it. On Warp 4, disable it from System / User
Interface / Window Manipulation / Full Window Dragging.
- Your CPU is too slow (or overheated). We recommend you
have at least a Pentium 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.
- You have a very old or just generally bad motherboard,
video card or IO controller card. This is a rare problem, though.
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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 kernel.)
- Your system doesn't support DIVE (Direct Video
Extensions). Try renaming visplug\analyzer.dll to
something else.
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My mouse cursor is jerky or jumpy!
- You have a bad video driver. You should try SciTech
Display Drivers 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.
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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 2**30 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.