[MPlayer-users] option to avoid "Audio: no sound"?

[Oliver Seitz]

It's one thing to make sound work correctly, but it's another thing to 
control mplayer. I think it should be possible to tell mplayer to only 
play if both audio and video can be played.

If you've got sound output via USB, how do you configure it that the 
plug can not be pulled out? I think it should be discussed how to make 
mplayer act in a certain way if no audio or video output device can be 
used. I think this is not the place to tell people to fix their sound 
settings instead.

It could be made default to only play if both audio and video can be 
played. You then can accept to play video only by appending ",null" to 
your -ao list, or to play audio only by appending ",null" to your -vo list.

One drawback is, if mplayer finds no output device now, it does not 
decode. If you're forcing it to play to "null", more CPU is consumed.

Greets,
Kiste