[MPlayer-users] alsa-space? xrun?

[Pandora]

The alsa people would probably be more prepared to solve this, but
I'll give a shot here too.  When I play a movie prepared for my class,
in what AFAIK is the standard Quicktime format (standard, heh), and I
start getting lines like this like crazy:

alsa-space: xrun of at least 0.129 msecs. resetting stream

And every time one of those lines comes (~500ms or so), the video and
audio both stop, making the movie start and stop like a strobe light.
Um... and here's the creepy part:
cd ~cvs/
$ find alsa-* -type f | xargs grep alsa-space
# nothing...
$ find mplayer -type f | xargs grep alsa-space
# nothing...

Anyone run into this?  Know of a workaround?  I can't use the OSS
emulation as the following bugzilla suggests:
https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=1179
That just makes my sound card go loopy and cover every sound with
angry static, not to mention avoiding dmix just kinda... sucks.

I wouldn't bother you guys, but this doesn't happen for every movie;
only Quicktime movies it seems.  I tried mencoding it into an avi file
and got this:
$ mencoder -ovc lavc -oac lavc ../1_1.mov -o 1_1.avi
# blah blah blah
[mp2 @ 0x85783c8]bitrate 224 is not allowed in mp2
Couldn't open codec mp2, br=224

Is my movie's audio set to a strange bitrate?  I don't want to have to
go to my computer lab, and use their fresh scented Windows XP the DRM
version, and the CD's happy pretty Macromedia sponsored and designed
and owned proprietary presentation program.  The designers are "not
suck" enough to provide the raw media files, and I'd really rather use
Linux to play them.