[MPlayer-users] Audio skips (fu:AC3 passthrough on SB Live! 5.1, audio skips)

[Jan Knutar]

> I have similar problems. Whenever the system is under load -- more precisely
> io load, i.e. hard disk activity -- mplayer tends to skip audio data.

DMA and unmask irq's turned on?

> I am using Linux 2.6.5(-SuSE7.95) with its bundled ALSA driver (cs46xx). Both
> of -ao alsa1x and -ao pcm (=OSS emulation) of MPlayer 1.0pre4 and pre5 do skip
> audio under load. (Such as dd if=/dev/zero of=test count=999999 bs=4096)

Do you use -cache with mplayer? Mplayer might just be starved for input...

> If, it skips rapidly so that within two "reality" seconds, already one minute
> of audio has passed (lots of, but not noisy highfreq pops, like soft static)

On one machine I have, 'alsarec' gives me nothing but 75% chunks of static with
25% chunks of real recording, and on the same system, esdrec which uses esd
which uses OSS which is really emulated works absolutely perfectly.

Needless to say, I don't quite trust alsa yet. I think they care more about latency
than reliability...