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

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. I tried adding Alsa "ao=alsa" , but then Firefox connecting to the RTL site, and clicking the "listen live" button resulted in some buffering, but then it just stopped (no more traffic), which seems to indicate that Alsa is a no-go with Mplayerplugin. I use aoss with Opera to listen to bbc.co.uk/radio4, using the RealPlayer plugin, but there is some crackling on top of the speech when using aoss, but I can use Gaim at the same time, and receive Gaim's sounds. Soundcard is Ensoniq PCI (ens1371 driver) (No hardware mixing) Although I can't use other music apps at the same time, I must say that the Mplayerplugin using "mplayerplug-in-wmp.so" works really well with RTL radio.fr, listening to live music. I've had no audio dropouts like I get with the BBC using realplayers nphelix.so. Any suggestions with the Mplayerplugin, and Alsa problem welcome. Nigel.