[pulseaudio-discuss] Problems with mplayer in Ubuntu 10.04

[Mihai Sucan]

Hello everyone!

A follow-up to the problem I have:

Reimar Döffinger replied with a concise answer to the problem on the  
mplayer-users mailing list:
http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2010-May/079933.html

... which is fun to read. Thanks Reimar :)

Any further expert opinions on this matter? I wouldn't like to go through  
hoops of compilation fun to get a working OpenAL / MPlayer. If I am not  
mistaken, this bug is known at Ubuntu.


Best regards,
Mihai



Le Sun, 09 May 2010 14:23:14 +0300, Colin Guthrie <gmane at colin.guthr.ie> a  
écrit:

> Hi,
>
> Just for clarity to others reading, we discussed and tried to debug this
> issue a lot on IRC already, so I'm familiar with the problem.
>
> 'Twas brillig, and Mihai Sucan at 09/05/10 12:06 did gyre and gimble:
>> 4. somehow i think that mplayer -ao pulse does "pretty much the same" as
>> it does mplayer -ao oss from the rvm Ubuntu PPA. The latter did take
>> control of the sound card, via OSS. The former does somehow take control
>> of the sound card, pulseaudio looses it, then mplayer happily goes on to
>> use pulseaudio for subsequent audio stream output, but now ...  
>> pulseaudio
>> is silenced.
>
> Well mplayer -ao oss will bypass pulse completely and, as you say,
> basically "hog" the sound h/w. You can theoretically use:
>  padsp mplayer -ao oss
>
> and that should redirect oss output via PA too, but this may or may not
> work overly reliably (aka YMMV).
>
> The interesting thing about the report is that when PA stops outputting
> audible sound, the vumeters are properly moving up and down which means
> that the sinks are not suspended, nor are the sinks unloaded and
> replaced with a "Dummy Output" (null-sink) because they've been
> unloaded. In other words everything seems setup to work correctly but
> the reasons are eluding us!
>
> One thing you don't mention above, but is included in your debug output
> is the fact that the alsa mixer output is not any different before vs.
> after the problem. My initial hypothesis was that mplayer was somehow
> flipping the digital output switch in alsa, thus causing it to seem like
> it had simply stopped working. However analysis of the amixer output
> seems to kill this idea.
>
>
> So if anyone else has any bright ideas, please speak up!
>
> Col
>


-- 
Mihai Sucan
http://www.robodesign.ro