Simple issue simple solution: Ubuntu as usual completely skipped any and all quality checks (though in this case they are not the only ones) and shippes a completely broken OpenAL version which does ALSA stuff whenever the library gets loaded (whoever came up with this deserves to be banned from any and all software development for at least a year). If PulseAudio is the only thing that this breaks you're lucky. Solutions: 1) Remove OpenAL, completely and compile your own MPlayer 2) Get a non-broken OpenAL package from somewhere and use that instead 3) Use some kind of wrapper library that redirects ALSA accesses or do some other thing that makes sure OpenAL can't actually do anything bad to your soundcard via ALSA.
