mplayer sound stuttering

[blubb234]

When playing media with mplayer, sound and audio "stutter" (actually both freeze for a moment then continue and freeze again). This happens when using the "-ao pulse" and "-ao alsa" switches. When using "-ao oss" everything works, but only when no other sound is playing via pulseaudio. When using "-ao alsa" mplayer prints the following everytime the media freezes:

[AO_ALSA] Write error: Broken pipe-0.012 17/ 17 18% 7% 0.7% 8 0 97%

[AO_ALSA] Trying to reset soundcard.

Apart from that there are no apparent problems with pulseaudio on my system.

My system:

Fedora 8

MPlayer 1.0rc2-4.1.2

pulseaudio 0.9.7

Onboard sound ( snd_intel8x0 )

[helge]

I'm having the exact same problem in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy, both when using mplayer with the ALSA wrapper (-ao alsa) and the native pulse plugin (-ao pulse).

Mplayer 1.0rc2-4.2.3 pulseaudio 0.9.9

Another problem is that in VLC sound is delayed by around 5 seconds. I read somewhere else it's because VLC request a very large buffer, but fails to detect when the buffer is full and therefore just starts playing.

[coling]

FYI, VLC has direct support for pulse in SVN. Patches for stable release can be found in the Mandriva packages

FWIW I don't personally have any issues with mplayer+pulse on Mandriva.