Bug#674145: mplayer2: mplayer does not stop after playing a file

[Uoti Urpala]

On Thu, 2012-05-24 at 13:47 +0200, Martin Ziegler wrote:
> mplayer said that the output device was pulse:
> 
> AO: [pulse]
> 
> Wenn I use mplayer with the option "-ao alsa" everything 
> works fine. Thanks!

This is most likely a Pulseaudio bug then.


> It might be interesting that the version of mplayer in the 
> package "mplayer" does not hit this bug. It works also with 
> the option "-ao pulse".

The old code in MPlayer 1 exits the main play loop after all audio has
been buffered, regardless of the amount of audio not actually played yet
(a "flush all buffered audio" operation is performed later). So it's
expected that this Pulseaudio bug does not have the same effect. The
problem with the old code is that the player can become unresponsive for
relatively long periods during the flush operation, even with audio
output drivers that function perfectly.

It would be possible to add some workarounds on the player side for this
bug. But I'm not sure whether that would be worth it, as there are so
many bugs in Pulseaudio, and 2.0 broke more things again. Trying to work
around just this bug feels somewhat pointless in this situation. The
current situation where Pulseaudio has become the standard sound output
method but seems to lack developers to fix even fairly blatant bugs in
basic functionality is unfortunate.