[MPlayer-users] problem with ac3 playback

[Dave Alden]

Hi,
  I'm trying to use mplayer to play a divx file with AC-3 audio:

% mplayer -ac hwac3 troll.avi

It successfully plays the audio, but the video is blank.    After awhile,
I get the dreaded "Your system is too SLOW to play this!" message.  My
system is an Athlon XP 2000+, 512M RAM, and Maxtor 160GB (8M cache) HD
running Redhat 9 and mplayer 0.90.  I've tried the following:

With Creative's open source emu10k1 driver (for AC-3 passthrough):

 1) Tried "mplayer -ac hwac3 troll.avi" and go the "too slow" error.
 2) Tried "mplayer -autosync 30 -ac hwac3 troll.avi", didn't get the
    too slow error, but had the exact same results (audio is fine, no video)
 3) Tried "mplayer -autosync 100 -ac hwac3 troll.avi" and had the same results
    as with "-autosync 30".

Reinstalled OS from scratch, installed ALSA 0.9.4:

 1) Tried the same things as I did with Creative's driver and had the same
    results.
 2) Tried "-vo sdl", no error, but no video either (audio is fine)

Help?

...dave

ps  I don't believe there to be any problem with the source file -- I can
    play it fine with xine and with a divx player on my Windows box.  If
    I remove "-ac hwac3", it plays through the entire movie without any
    problems.