[MPlayer-users] Problems with arts audio output

[Michael Flohr]

Hi,

earlier I did report some problems with "mplayer -ao arts" under
KDE 3.1. I have tried to investigate the problem further, here my
perliminary results:

I use mplayer 0.90rc4 and KDE 3.1 on SuSE 7.3.

Mplayer works fine most of the time. However, there are a few
files, in my case they are of type .avi, where the following happens:
"mplayer -ao arts file.avi" starts up and opens video and sound
output. Arts is recognized and the sound chain is buil. At the very
moment where mplayer usually start with actually displaying the
movie, it simply stops. The reason for this is that the artsd sound
server has crashed. Unfortunately, neither artsd nor mpalyer give
any error output which might hint towards the cause.

Xine pr Vlc playe the same files fine, also using the arts plugin. No other
application I use which connects to arts (e.g. xmms) shows this behaviour.
So, I would guess that it is a problem wtih mplayer.

But now the mysteries start: After artsd crashed, or perhaps during
the crash, the kernel reports that its drm module has unmapped a
reserved chunk of memory. As a further cause, DRI (for hardware
accelerated 3d under XFree 4.1.0) gets disabled! This never happens
except, and predictably, when mplayer somehow causes artsd to
crash.

That lets me think that something goes terribly wrong here, which
shouldn't happen. The strangest thing is that nothing of this ever
happend with the old artsd of KDE 2.2.x. So, it might be artsd
after all, but I don't have a clue. As far as I know, arts got some
new features such as something called GSL sheduling, which
weren't there in the KDE 2.2.x releases. As I said, the same files
can be played by xine or vlc using arts output without problems.

I can upload one of the .avi files which cause this behaviour, if
someone wants to investigate this. Please let me know then,
where and how to upload the file.

Finally, I should add that mplayer plays the files in question without
problem, when I use "mplayer -ao oss".

Michael