[MPlayer-users] choice of audio device ...

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 17 Jun 2012, at 00:53, Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson at cox.net> wrote:
> On 06/16/2012 11:44 AM, Albretch Mueller wrote:
>>> $ mplayer -v -ao oss -alang eng -slang eng -autosync 30 -dvd-device
>>> /dev/sr0 dvd://1
>>> 
> 
> OSS?  Sure, if you use {Free|Open|Net}BSD.
> 
> OTOH, the Linux kernel deprecated OSS about a decade ago and removed it 5ish years ago, and for a couple of years PulseAudio has been the preferred sound system in both Fedora and Ubuntu.  ALSA does, though, have OSS emulation.

Which in my experience is broken half the time.
It's a good idea to use whatever is "native" on your system.
Usually that would be ALSA for a modern Linux.
However some systems have made ALSA redirect all audio to pulseaudio, which means you get all the issues of -ao pulse plus loads more (e.g. those bugs that MPlayer works around if you use -ao pulse directly).
So usually on Linux you would use -ao pulse, if that does not work well, you make sure to disable/remove pulseaudio and fix ALSA trying to use it and then use -ao alsa (-ao alsa:hw=0.0 or such can be worth a try, too).