mplayer failing to fully dump audio to pcm

[Moji]

I use a script to convert all of my vob files on my mythtv box to mkv files with h264 video and vorbis audio.

Recently I changed how the script works and now when the script dumps the audio from the encoded h264 file it fails to dump all of it.
It doesn't seem to be giving a INT, EXIT, TERM, or KILL signal when it fails to dump the audio.
Because I only have part of the audio when it remuxes the files using mkvmerge I end up with a mkv file that only has sound for a portion of the final mkv file and then cuts out.

I've run this script one at a time and it seems to work but when I run more than one instance is when I seem to get the partial failures.

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas as to why this would happen or how I might go about fixing it.

I do have more than enough room on the drive for the audio (over 100gb remaining, and the .wav files are less than 300mb).

Here is the fcron line that I use to start the scripts:

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@exesev(true),runas(mythtv),mail(false),nice(19)        5       /scripts/bin/croncoder

Here is the command that seems to be failing without giving a INT TERM KILL or EXIT command:

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mplayer -really-quiet video.h264 -ao pcm:waveheader:file=audio.wav -vc dummy -vo null || exit

Anyone have an idea as to why that command is not completing, yet not sending an error signal?

-MJ

[yngwin]

This is what I'd use:

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mplayer video.h264 -ao pcm:fast:file=audio.wav -vc null -vo null

[Moji]

yngwin,

Thanks for the suggested mplayer line.
I'm using the -vc null and the fast option in mplayer now.

While looking up the fast option I noticed a comment in the man page that might be the cause of the problem I am having.

Try to dump faster than realtime. Make sure the output
does not get truncated (usually with "Too many video
packets in buffer" message). It is normal that you get
a "Your system is too SLOW to play this!" message.

So I think that I might be getting too many packets in the buffer, that might explain why I have the problem when running more than one instance of the script at once (trying to encode more than one thing at a time using mencoder).

Any suggestions on a workaround for this?

-MJ