[MPlayer-users] Jerky sound with bluetooth headsets

[Leszek Koltunski]

Recently the blueZ project released bluez-utils and bluez-libs packages
with support for sending audio output to bluetooth headsets. I've got
one and I noticed weird problems MPlayer has with this.

Facts:

1) audacious, aplay can send audio to the bluetooth headset
thru A2DP with no problems

2) totem can play a movie while sending smooth audio to the headset 

3) mplayer -ao alsa:device=headset file.mp3  ( i.e. playing audio only )
works with no problem

4) mplayer -ao alsa:device=headset file.avi ( i.e. playing video and
audio ) results in a terribly choppy sound. Tried with at least 20
different files which all play ok if the sound is routed to a regular
audio card

5) The following sequence 

mplayer file.avi -dumpaudio
mplayer stream.dump -ao alsa:device=headset

results in a smooth playback, even though when file.avi was played with
video the sound was jerky

6) mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao alsa:device=headset file.avi  -->
still choppy sound!!! Pretty incredible.

7) I've seen one file play ok until I resized the video. Then suddenly
ALSA announced 'broken pipe' and sound became jerky.

Conclusion: when audio & video is present in the stream ( even if the
video is not decoded at all ) Mplayer has problems sending audio to
bluetooth headsets. Totem does not have such problems. 

At least one more person has the same problem, see one bugreport from
the bluez-utils mailinglist:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=9a119b3c0711230758v7fa8a53eub2532227762542bd%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=bluez-users