[MPlayer-users] Strange ALSA behaviour

[Jurgens du Toit]

Hey all...

I have slack 10, with the 2.6 kernel and the new alsa libs.

I used the alsa plugin with xmms, using hw0,3 as the audio device. I 
also set the mixer device to "Wave". This worked fine... Until I tried 
to play a dvd to mplayer.

Mplayer was a freshly compiled 1.0pre5, with alsa support. mplayer would 
play the dvd with video out, but no audio out, and it didn't complain 
about the adio not working.

I figured that i'm using the wrong device, and eventually got it to work 
with
mplayer dvd:// -ao alsa:mmap:device=hw#0.3
But now my volume control in xmms doens't work anymore, no matter what 
device I set the volume control to (except for the software volume control)
I even tried with alsamixer, but none of the sliders respond.

My questions are what happened?

What exactly are the alsa sound devices? Should there be any symbolic 
links to /dev/sound/something?

Thnx!
Sorry for the crosspost