[linux-audio-user] Mplayerplugin. Can it use Alsa?

[Nigel Henry]

On Sunday 20 August 2006 01:13, carmen wrote:
> On Sun Aug 20, 2006 at 12:43:23AM +0200, Nigel Henry wrote:
> > I lam listening to RTL radio.fr. It uses Realplayer for previous (listen
> > again) transmissions, but uses WMP for live audio streams. I gave up on
> > trying to get any version of WMP working under Wine, but Mplayerplugin is
> > working ok, but appears to be using OSS, as does RealPlayer.
> >
> > Mplayer is setup to use Alsa, but Mplayerplugin's /etc/mplayerplugin.conf
> > indicates defaults for aRts, esd, and oss.  Does anyone know if it
> > actually is supposed to work with Alsa.
>
> yep. works great here. although i recently switched to ao=jack since jackd
> 1.0.2 no longer segfaultks with divide by zero errors in the alsa-interface
> callback every 5 minutes like previous versions.
>
> fwiw, every line in my /etc/mplayerplug-in.conf is commented out, so its
> just using whatever is in /etc/mplayer.conf. which makes getting audio
> running smoothly easy to debug.
>
> note also, that WMV and RealMedia are supported in recent versions of
> FFMPEG. so update that, and your mplayer, and you cna proably remove your
> proprietary codecs...which could possibly improve playback
> reliability..since its not using a hacked dlopen and weird pointer tricks
> to run windows binaries...

Update from last night:

Rechecked Mplayer, and made sure that it's using Alsa. I'd previously messed 
with the Alsa config options on Mplayer, but I've now left them as default, 
and can use Mplayer at the same time as Mhwaveedit (which uses Alsa) is 
playing an .ogg file. So far so good.

Opening Firefox, and starting the live audio stream from RTL runs fine, but 
now Mhwaveedit tells me that the cards busy.

Back into /etc/mplayerplugin.conf. I'd added the line:
ao=alsa         #added by me
This was obviously wrong as the comment was on the same line, so I changed 
this to:
ao=alsa

Now I can play a live audio stream from RTL radio.fr using 
mplayerplug-in-wmp.so, at the same time as playing an .ogg file through 
Mhwaveedit.

Incidentally. When I could not play both at once, ps auxw showed 2 instances 
of Mplayer, but no mention of Alsa. Since I added the "ao=alsa" line 
to /etc/mplayerplugin.conf, I now have in ps auxw, 3 instances of Mplayer, 
and all displaying "-ao alsa". 

I'm about to look at FFMPEG, which I don't have installed on FC2.

Thanks for your help.

Nigel.