Hi, Just for clarity to others reading, we discussed and tried to debug this issue a lot on IRC already, so I'm familiar with the problem. 'Twas brillig, and Mihai Sucan at 09/05/10 12:06 did gyre and gimble: > 4. somehow i think that mplayer -ao pulse does "pretty much the same" as > it does mplayer -ao oss from the rvm Ubuntu PPA. The latter did take > control of the sound card, via OSS. The former does somehow take control > of the sound card, pulseaudio looses it, then mplayer happily goes on to > use pulseaudio for subsequent audio stream output, but now ... pulseaudio > is silenced. Well mplayer -ao oss will bypass pulse completely and, as you say, basically "hog" the sound h/w. You can theoretically use: padsp mplayer -ao oss and that should redirect oss output via PA too, but this may or may not work overly reliably (aka YMMV). The interesting thing about the report is that when PA stops outputting audible sound, the vumeters are properly moving up and down which means that the sinks are not suspended, nor are the sinks unloaded and replaced with a "Dummy Output" (null-sink) because they've been unloaded. In other words everything seems setup to work correctly but the reasons are eluding us! One thing you don't mention above, but is included in your debug output is the fact that the alsa mixer output is not any different before vs. after the problem. My initial hypothesis was that mplayer was somehow flipping the digital output switch in alsa, thus causing it to seem like it had simply stopped working. However analysis of the amixer output seems to kill this idea. So if anyone else has any bright ideas, please speak up! Col -- Colin Guthrie gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/] Open Source: Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/] PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/] Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]
