How a looney programmer spends a weekend :-).

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Sat, 17 Aug 2013 09:46:34 -0400
Tom Horsley <horsley1953 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Chasing a mysterious bug:
> 
> http://home.comcast.net/~tomhorsley/game/heisenbug.html

A lot of fun, as I can see! :-)

Reading through, as soon as you said that you are using mplayer in a
cron job I thought "maybe he should set -vo null", but later I saw
that you have already figured that out. :-)

That said, I would say that this is not a bug in the Intel drivers, but 
in mplayer itself. Namely, in the mplayer man page one can find the
following comment for the -identify option:

"Combine this with -frames 0 to suppress all video output."

Arguably, this combination of options should not require the DISPLAY to
be set. IOW, mplayer should treat "-frames 0" as a special case. OTOH,
as complicated as mplayer already is, patching it for that special case
might not be worth the devs effort. Especially if "-vo null" works
around it.

Anyway, it's an interesting corner-case. :-)

Best, :-)
Marko