Hi, I'm toying around with a Tk frontend to mplayer. One of the ways I can use it, is in slave mode, reading from STDIN. When I do this, I need to feed it a file fast to avoid frame drops, like:

my $pid = open(MP, " | mplayer @options  -v 3 -  ");

   open (FH,"< z.mpg");
   read( FH, my $buf, -s FH );
   close FH;
   print MP $buf;
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That works without dropping any frames. But I want to be able to interrupt the STDIN feed, and I've tried things like

       open( FH, "< z.mpg" );
        while ( sysread FH, my $data, 32678 ) {
            if($pause == 1){ goto ENDP }
               else{syswrite MP, $data;}
        }
     ENDP:
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The problem is that it sends all the $data to mplayer almost immediately, so even if it is a long, say 1 minute video, and I set "$pause = 1" immediately after starting, the pause has no effect, and the entire video is played. Does anyone have a way of throttling this?

Or is there a way to sysread off of the slurped $buf a chunk at a time. I've been able to write to a variable as a filehandle, but am having trouble reading it like a filehandle.