[MPlayer-users] Re: [Fwd: gmplayer 0.9-1]

[Jonathan Rogers]

Graeme Nichols wrote:
> Hello Jonathan, I now have gmplayer actually playing the movie but I
> have been unsuccessful in getting the sound to work. I have tried the
> suggestions in the FAQ but with no success. I must admit to not being
> very good with sound. The DVD player plays CDs with no problem under
> Gnome 2 (I'm running RH8) so the sound card (Creative Vibra 128) works
> fine. What am I missing here?
> 
> The other funny thing about playing this particular DVD (A Harry Potter
> promotional DVD) with the command line gmplayer dvd://1 is that it plays
> through to the beginning of the menu that starts to come up then stops.
> If I use the command gmplayer dvd://2 it starts to play the next title
> (or chapter or something) If I play it on Win Me using Cyberlink
> PowerDVD it plays up to the menu and allows me to select from the menu.
> Is there a command line switch or something that I need to set to get it
> to play all the titles/chapters in sequence?

I usually just use "mplayer dvd://1", since almost all movies are title 
#1 on the DVD, though that's probably not required by the standard. I 
don't know about playing all of the titles in sequence, though it's been 
discussed on the list before. You can search the archives. If you guess 
there are ten titles on a DVD, "mplayer $(for n in $(seq 10); do echo 
dvd://$n; done)" should work. If you want to be able to navigate the 
menus, Xine or Ogle will serve you well.

> I have attached the output of the above command (which I redirected to a
> file) that may give you some pointers about the sound problem etc.

I'm happy to give assistance, but I'm not sure if I can in this 
instance. Oddly, mplayer doesn't seem to have given any clues as to why 
the audio isn't playing. It clearly found and is able to decode the AC3 
stream and the only clue that something is wrong is the message "Audio: 
no sound" immediately before "Starting playback...". I get "alsa-init" 
messages at that point, but you may be using OSS sound drivers. When I 
switch to mplayer's "-ao oss", I get this line: "AO: [oss] 48000Hz 2ch 
Signed 16-bit (Little-Endian) (2 bps)". You may want to run mplayer with 
the "-v" option for more verbose messages.

It could be that mplayer doesn't know what output module to use. Try 
adding "-ao oss", "-ao alsa9", or "-ao sdl" to mplayer's command line.

Do you have any applications that successfully play PCM audio, such as 
XMMS? Playing CDs doesn't necessarily use the PCM output on the sound 
card. Also, try playing other media files with mplayer, such as music MP3s.

It may be that your sound card can't play at sample rates higher than 
44.1 kHz, though I think that's extremely unlikely. If so, adding "-af 
resample=44100" to mplayer's command line may help. I have a Creative 
Labs Ensoniq AudioPCI (es1371), which may be very similar to yours. 
Companies are always renaming products for marketing reasons.

Jonathan Rogers