[MPlayer-users] choice of audio device ...

[Albretch Mueller]

> OTOH, the Linux kernel deprecated OSS
~
 I see. I had noticed sound started to get degraded as I watched a
long movie or many little ones. Here is the sound baseline I got:
~
$ sudo lspci -v
 ...
00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400
AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
 Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Device 3009
 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, slow devsel, latency 64, IRQ 17
 Memory at fe02a000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
 Capabilities: [40] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit-
 Kernel driver in use: ATI IXP AC97 controller
 ...
~
$ ls -l /proc/asound/card0
total 0
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 17 10:40 atiixp
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Jun 17 10:40 codec97#0
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 17 10:40 id
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 17 10:40 oss_mixer
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root 0 Jun 17 10:40 pcm0c
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root 0 Jun 17 10:40 pcm0p
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root 0 Jun 17 10:40 pcm1p
~
$ lsmod | grep snd
snd_atiixp   9174  2
snd_ac97_codec         77917  1 snd_atiixp
ac97_bus      742  1 snd_ac97_codec
~
$ alsactl -v
alsactl version 1.0.23
~
> So usually on Linux you would use -ao pulse
~
 For some weird reason my hardware and software don't seem to be teaming up
~
$ dpkg -l | grep -i ac97

$ dpkg -l | grep -i atiixp

$ dpkg -l | grep -i pulse
ii  gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio  0.10.30-1  GStreamer plugin for PulseAudio
ii  libpulse-browse0          0.9.23-1   PulseAudio client libraries
(zeroconf support)
ii  libpulse-mainloop-glib0   0.9.23-1   PulseAudio client libraries
(glib support)
ii  libpulse0      0.9.23-1   PulseAudio client libraries
ii  libsox-fmt-pulse          14.3.1-1   SoX PulseAudio format I/O library
ii  pulseaudio     0.9.23-1   PulseAudio sound server
ii  pulseaudio-esound-compat  0.9.23-1   PulseAudio ESD compatibility layer
ii  pulseaudio-module-x11     0.9.23-1   X11 module for PulseAudio sound server
ii  pulseaudio-utils          0.9.23-1   Command line tools for the
PulseAudio sound server
~
 Also I searched and found way too many cases of "mplayer -ao alsa hw
hw plughw device ..." uses, but could not find this section on the
mplayer tutorial. I would like to fix the problem and understand it
well too in case I need to troubleshoot a similar one
~
 What would you suggest to squeeze the best performance out of it?
~
 thanks
 lbrtchx