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

[Nix]

  On 2010.10.21. 20:01, Oliver Seitz wrote:
> 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.

1) that sounds like a perfectly fine... Rube Goldberg machine
2) I really doubt that this should be discussed in users mailing list
3) yes, i believe that fixing the source of the problem is the right 
approach besides MPlayer is only one of the many programs affected by 
original posters malfunctioning sound system.
Sorry if I've insulted anyone,
nix