I don't know if anyone else ran into it, but this is funny.

Lately I've been using SMPlayer for playing video, and I've been 
having issues with video skipping if the table that my laptop is 
sitting on is bumped -- it makes the video randomly skip.  I've been 
occasionally trying to figure out the problem and wondering if it was 
rogue keyboard or mouse wheel events -- but reassigning keys and 
turning off mouse input didn't help.

I finally got a hint about it the other day on my desktop; while 
playing some video with SMPlayer I picked up a USB joystick that was 
plugged into it, and the video jumped.  Yes that's right -- SMPlayer 
accepts joystick input, because MPlayer does that by default.

>From here I knew what it was.  I've also been loading the tp-smapi 
module for my laptop, which allows access to several hardware-specific 
devices for Thinkpads such as setting the battery charge thresholds.  
tp-smapi also comes with an 'hdaps' module to get access to the 
accelerometers to shut down the hard disk in case the laptop gets 
droped; however this shows up as a JOYSTICK device.  Oops!

Adding the "-nojoystick" to the "Options for MPlayer" command line in 
the "Advanced" section did the trick.

So it wasn't a hardware problem -- it was a feature!

   -- Chris

-- 

Chris Knadle
[email protected]
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