mplayer sound problems

Forum: Multimedia
Topic: mplayer sound problems
started by: jbrandligt

Posted by jbrandligt on Aug. 19 2005,14:57

Hi,

I have a problem with audio in mplayer. I am using the alsa sound drivers. I am testing on an Asrock k7vt4a motherboard which has a buildin soundcard using a via chipset.
First i had the mplayer.dsl package installed, but i couldn't get it to play mpeg files at the right speed. The playback was always too fast.

So then i installed the mplayer-xfree86 package. I am also using xfree86 and nvidia so it seemed like a good thing to try.
The mpeg files are playing at the right speed now but audio quality is rather poor. : /

I tried it on a few different motherboards (Abit nf7-s2 and Asrock k7vt4a) with different chipsets aswell (nforce and via) but that doesn't make any difference.

So, does anybody know how to improve the audio quality using mplayer from the mplayer-xfree86 package??? Any feedback would be appriciated.

thanks,
jeroen

Posted by adraker on Aug. 19 2005,21:57

You did say ANY feedback..
I'm using it mainly on an old low-ram laptop,
Crystal audio, Neomagic video, I once had
outstandingly bad sound with an Mpeg 1
music video clip, it had layer 2 audio.
Couldn't resolve the problem at the time,
ended up editng the clip for mp3 sound (Lame).
Generally, on wmv and other mpegs, I have no
problems.
Do you have the problem on all types of streams?

Perhaps if you launch from console you'll get
some usefull feedback from Mplayer about what
it is actually doing with itself- codecs, lost sync,
framedrop etc.

The only other idea I have that you might try is
to get the 12 megs worth of codecs in bz2 form
from the Mplayer site, de-compress them, and
put them into /opt/mplayer/codecs.
That is, if you can spare the ramspace.
The idea being that Mplayer may be using a "substitute"
codec by default.

Hope something here helps.

Posted by mikshaw on Aug. 19 2005,22:11

If the sound warbles, as if it was playing underwater, you can probably fix it by using a different audio decoder. I was getting this when playing VCDs, so i use this command to fix it:
mplayer -afm ffmpeg
This tries FFmpeg's libavcodec codecs first before falling back on whatever the default is.

Posted by jbrandligt on Aug. 20 2005,19:39

Thanks for the feedback adraker and mikshaw! These are realy usefull tips. I'll post the results later.

cheers.

Posted by jbrandligt on Aug. 20 2005,21:29

Yes mikshaw, spot on!!! My problem was as you described so I tried your solution first. And it worked like charm. Thanks a lot!

adraker thanks for your post aswell. Maybe i'll ad the extra codecs anyway, disk space is no issue for me :-)

cheers,
Jeroen