[pulseaudio-discuss] Problems with mplayer in Ubuntu 10.04

[Daniel Chen]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Mihai Sucan <mihai.sucan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tested with a Guest session (temporarily created user account, always
> fresh/clean). The same happens. I simply start mplayer and pulseaudio stops
> outputting any sound.

According to http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2010-May/079934.html
this symptom is caused by the outdated version of openal-soft shipped
in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The remarks in that thread are unfortunately
ignorant of the fact that the tag date for 1.12.854 was Tue, 30 Mar
2010 05:05:21 +0000 (22:05 -0700), which was much too close to Lucid's
release date. Also importantly, unless there is a significantly
compelling reason, the Lucid development cycle synced directly
(without any Ubuntu changes) from Debian testing. Please note that of
this writing, the version of openal-soft in Debian testing *and*
unstable remains the precise version that shipped in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS:

$ apt-cache madison openal-soft
openal-soft | 1:1.11.753-1 | http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
lucid/universe Sources
$ rmadison -uqa openal-soft
openal-soft | 1:1.4.272-2 |        stable | source
openal-soft | 1:1.9.563-1 |      unstable | source
openal-soft | 1:1.11.753-1 |       testing | source
openal-soft | 1:1.11.753-1 |      unstable | source

Of course this instance is an unfortunate example of newer software
being released while the distribution was in a freeze state. In fact,
WINE as shipped in Lucid suffers from the same classes of problems. At
this point, the only hope of getting a newer openal-soft into Lucid
lies in getting it backported from Maverick, which means that someone
needs to generate and upload that source package to Maverick (which
may well mean Luke, myself, or any other dev, but we're all quite
jet-lagged ATM).

Best,
-Dan