Bug#576592: mplayer - Tries to use OSS first

[Bastian Blank]

On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 07:59:05PM -0400, Andres Mejia wrote:
> On Monday 05 April 2010 17:19:38 Bastian Blank wrote:
> > mplayer tries to use OSS first. With gmplayer this even produces an
> > warning dialog box. Using OSS is bad because the default implementation
> > (the kernel OSS emulation for ALSA) does not support multiplexing and
> > therefor disallows any other access to the sound device.
> 
> Ok. I do see this to be an issue on systems with ALSA or Pulseaudio, but why
> the severity grave? This to me seems to merit severity of important.

I think about critical in the meantime, because it breaks audio access
for _other_ applications.

> I thought ALSA already handles OSS emulation by default, and it's certainly
> possible to do the same with Pulseaudio. On top of that, you can set
> /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf to use any audio output driver as default.

No, the OSS emulation is rather limited and supports only one
application, while the native library interface supports multiplexing of
many applications.

The other solution is to disable the OSS emulation completely on the
kernel side and fix all this similar problems there.

Bastian

-- 
Worlds are conquered, galaxies destroyed -- but a woman is always a woman.
		-- Kirk, "The Conscience of the King", stardate 2818.9