[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH 0/5] various enhancements and bugfixes for the ALSA driver

[Clemens Ladisch]

Jan Knutar wrote:

> > The usual remedy against underruns is increasing the buffer size,
> > but it seems mplayer.c tries to keep the amount of data in the
> > buffer between 100 and 250 ms, regardless of the actual buffer
> > size.  You might try to increase these values (0.10 and 0.25).
>
> Hm.
>
> > Another reason for synchronization problems might be that this
> > driver rounds down all audio transfers to a multiple of the period
> > size.
>
> Was this the case with the old driver too?

No, the old ALSA driver didn't.

> [...]
> So it seems a bit counterintuitive to have a large granularity... I
> wonder why it's there in the OSS driver.

Many of the old OSS/Free drivers in the kernel have ... interesting
behaviour.

> I tried changing the values to 1.25 and 0.2. I seem unable to trigger
> the audio skips anymore, despite abusing the spacebar for pausing and
> unpausing.

So I guess it would be worth to change mplayer.c, too.

The default buffer size is about 0.3 s, so I think increasing the
minimum is what had the most effect.

> I think default device points to dmix. I guess there's just no way to
> get this to work with dmix in Alsa 1.0.6?

dmix has changed much in later versions.

> maybe it would be time for upgrade for me, so this is possibly only
> something that affects users like me who haven't had the courage and
> a weekend to upgrade to the latest verison of their distro of choice
> yet? :-)

You could just compile ALSA separately.
In theory, updating alsa-lib only should work just fine.


Clemens