hmm, on Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 10:48:45AM +0000, Jacob Meuser said that > kind of useless by itself, and I was referring to the first item in > mplayer's README.OpenBSD.
right, to cut a long story shorter, it seems that: $ sudo sysctl kern.shminfo.shmall=32768 kern.shminfo.shmall: 8192 -> 32768 solved the problem. at least i can't reproduce it when shared memory is increased. the .mkv file plays fine as well. btw i am familiar with OpenBSD.README, but as it is worded at the moment and i don't use KDE, nor the gui, it didn't even occur to me to follow that particular advice. my bad. but yes, the vlc error messages pointed this way. btw. vlc plays the file too w/o the error messages, too bad i get this when i try to seek in it: [00000270] a52 decoder: A/52 channels:2 samplerate:48000 bitrate:192000 No accelerated IMDCT transform found vlc in free(): error: modified chunk-pointer Abort trap (core dumped) thanks for all the help from everybody trying to track this down. now back to trying to solve the opera issue :{ -f -- mexico's greatest export: their population.