when playing 8 channel audio files on hardware that's only capable of a less number of channels, the current mplayer from cvs exits with an ALSA error. earlier builds from near the beginning of last month would at least play the first 2 channels without immediately giving up, so this might be considered a regression of sorts. I'm not sure what might be considered the proper behaivor for mplayer to take in these situations, but perhaps it should truncate the audio to whatever the number of playback channels is, along with a warning. just giving up with an error is the part I don't like. yes, using -af channels=n gets around this.
