[MPlayer-dev-eng] [patch] prefer ALSA over OSS

Rich Felker dalias at aerifal.cx
Sat Apr 28 21:55:27 CEST 2007


On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 07:03:40PM +0200, Reimar Döffinger wrote:
> Hello,
> On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 06:47:33PM +0200, Attila Kinali wrote:
> > On Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:23:14 +0200
> > Adrian Bunk <bunk at stusta.de> wrote:
> > 
> > > In Linux kernel 2.6, ALSA is the default sound system.
> > > It contains an in-kernel OSS emulation, but using ALSA directly is 
> > > better.
> > > 
> > > MPlayer supports both ALSA and OSS, and this patch changes the order to 
> > > check for ALSA before checking for OSS.
> > 
> > I'm against it.
> > OSS emulation of ALSA is a lot less error prone than
> > alsa itself. Yes, you read right. Whom ever i had to
> > help with sound problems (broken driver system or
> > A/V sync problems) in the last two years always
> > had problems with ALSA that were easily solved
> > by using the OSS emulation.
> > 
> > Don't ask me why, i don't understand how ALSA works.
> 
> Well, that is most likely due to alsas resampling stuff, they manage to
> get it wrong always constantly.
> Unfortunately, since the latest changes in OSS emulation, OSS does not
> longer work correctly, it claims to support all frequencies but simply
> plays it back at the closest rate supported by the hardware.
> Thus on my system "mplayer -srate 96000" means everything is played at
> half speed.

Then use -srate 48000 or whatever your native samplerate is, and
include that in your config. BTW I think this can be fixed by
disabling the ALSA filters for OSS emulation in your kernel config..

Rich



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