Hello The SVN r28220 revision added a bug here which causes audio shuttering with Alsa using dmix under certain conditions (described below). r28219 works perfectly fine. Conditions: - So far it happens with all tested audio files (tested with .ogg and .mp3). - .avi file with mp3 audio codec was fine. Even playing the video with "-vo null" to mimic the audio only behaviour is also fine. - Only happens with dmix ("-ao alsa:device=dmix"). A direct access with "-ao alsa:device=hw=0.0" is ok. - "-ao sdl" or "-ao sdl:alsa" works good. Stuff like "-ao oss" is fine too. Audio Hardware: Card: HDA Intel, Chip: Analog Devices AD1984 ALSA (libs/utils): 1.0.17 The "shuttering" can be described as 20ms mute pause every 200ms, sounding like a buffer underrun. Commit that triggers the problem: $ svn diff -r28219:28220 Index: mplayer.c =================================================================== --- mplayer.c (revision 28219) +++ mplayer.c (revision 28220) @@ -2015,6 +2015,7 @@ current_module="play_audio"; while (1) { + int sleep_time; // all the current uses of ao_data.pts seem to be in aos that handle // sync completely wrong; there should be no need to use ao_data.pts // in get_space() @@ -2026,7 +2027,9 @@ // handle audio-only case: // this is where mplayer sleeps during audio-only playback // to avoid 100% CPU use - usec_sleep(10000); // Wait a tick before retry + sleep_time = (ao_data.outburst - bytes_to_write) * 1000 / ao_data.samplerate; + if (sleep_time < 10) sleep_time = 10; // limit to 100 wakeups per second + usec_sleep(sleep_time * 1000); } while (bytes_to_write) {