[linux-audio-user] Choosing a sound card for video playback

I've got two PCs which I use mainly for watching video with MPlayer (for various reasons Xine isn't so practical) and it has A/V sync problems on them. I think it may be because my cheap & nasty sound cards lack some feature that MPlayer relies on to sync properly: <http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/audio.html#sync>. Unfortunately it doesn't say exactly what the feature is and which are the bad drivers. One of the PCs has a cheap sound card using the snd_cmipci driver and the other has VIA onboard audio. The former also sometimes makes speech sound a bit muffled I think. I've heard of an "AC3 passthrough" feature. Does that mean the sound card decodes the audio stream instead of the CPU? Although I don't have a surround system ATM, I think it would be a nice feature to have in case I install one later. Meanwhile, would AC3 passthrough work for stereo AC3 streams? So what would be a good card to get? I've heard that the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is supposed to be very good, and I know it is supported by Linux, but I haven't been able to find out how well or whether it's likely to fix the A/V sync. I should be able to get one (or two) on eBay at a reasonable price. -- TH * http://www.realh.co.uk