Hi, I noticedhat the channel order sometimes gets messed up when playing backhe surround sound. Everything starts up just fine, but then at someime during the playback the channel order changes (i.e., center goeso subwoofer or front left, it looks like other channels shift accordingly). mplayer doesn't printnything special, and playback is otherwisenaffected. The seek or pause will always set the channel order backo normal. The problem is far more frequent whenhe system is under heavy load. Whenhe system is otherwise idle, the problem happens quite rarely (once orwice during a 2 hour movie, sometimes not at all). However, whenhe system is loaded (either CPU or disk IO), the problem happens every few minutes,ven though the playback is otherwise smooth. It feelss if some part of mplayer is expecting a real-time response fromhe system. I'm not familiar with the mplayer internals, but my theory ishat the audio decoder fails to deliver the sample in the timely manner (either dueo the lack of CPU time or the disk delay), somethinglse is used in its place (like the previous sample), and then theample that missed its place is played (instead of being dropped), thushifting the channel order. This would explain why the most frequent change ishe center channel going either to sub or front left (assuminghe native order of the dsp device is FL-FR-RL-RR-CE-SB, which Ihink it is). Of coursehe above could be totally wrong, so I would appreciate the opinion ofhose familiar with the mplayer internals. Under what circumstanceshe channel order might change? How does mplayer handle the case whenhe audio decoder is too slow? When the system is loaded so muchhat the sound becomes choppy, the channel order is pretty much random,o it seems that mplayer just starts dropping samples from the PCMtream without respect to their place. The problem occurs on Linux (Debianmd64) and Solaris. It's more frequent on Solaris, but Issume that's only because Solaris places somewhat higheroad on the system. The audio drivers are OSS 4.0, mplayer is from fairly recent svn build (dev-SVN-r27949-4.3.2). I've hadhis problem for longer than I can remember, it's just that on Linux it can often be neglected. I only playhe movies (mostly HD), so I'm not sure if the problem occurs when playingound only. Also, I tried playback from a simple test programnder heavy system load to see if the problem is with audio drivers, buthat doesn't seem to be the case. Thanks indvance for any input.
