[MPlayer-users] MPlayer – changing ‘ao=’ codec order in mplayer.conf does not appear to work for per user config?

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 08:06:59AM +0100, Jim Cross wrote:
> FIXED - well 'fudged' is a more accurate description.
> One could argue and say there is a limitation with MPlayer only looking for
> an environment value 'HOME' rather than a more robust mechanism to
> determine a users 'home' directory....

That behaviour is very much intentional.
If HOME is not set that is usually for a very good reason.
In your use case, because programs started from the server are very
much not supposed to use any "home".
The web server (in this case) told us not to use a HOME directory,
and I don't think we should "work around" that.

> Running MPlayer with 'env HOME=/var/www' will help MPlayer locate the users

Yes, that is indeed a hack. The proper solution is to set the bin-copy-environment
(or equivalent) option to tell the web server it should indeed pass that
through.
Even better might be to set bin-environment to only set MPLAYER_HOME,
thus still stopping other programs from accessing your home, except....

> config file without having to edit /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf. This also
> fixes the need to run MPlayer with sudo:

This would indicate that MPlayer wasn't the only component having issues
with missing home.
My best guess is that something (e.g. ALSA) tripped over that as well and
could not find its configuration, and as a result hanging MPlayer.