OSS playback not working properly with vlc v2.1.5
Greetings,
I recently compiled VLC v2.1(was using v2.0 so far), for Linux systems (got several such systems, the main ones being Core-i5 and Core2 Quad PCs) using OSS v4.2.
VLC v2.0 worked beautifully with OSS, but with v2.1 I went into serious troubles.
The worst one (a clear show stopper) is that as soon as the CPU gets loaded close to 100%, vlc fails to feed the sound stream in time to OSS and the audio gets choppy, as well as the video, making it impossible to watch a TV stream, for example.
A less serious (but still annoying) issue, is that VLC v2.1 seems to be adjusting its audio volume via the OSS PCM channel it got allocated by the OSS mixer. This would be fine, if only VLC was resetting the volume of that PCM channel to 100% before exiting, because failing to do so will get the next program getting that same channel allocated to find its volume very much reduced (most programs - in fact all the ones I used so far - never touch the volume level of the OSS PCM mixer channel and expect it to be at 100% always, when they are at all aware of that setting...).
Finally, to build VLC itself with OSS support, I had to resort to a hack, by creating a soft link to the OSS soundcard.h file (which normally resides inside /usr/lib/oss/include/sys) inside the /usr/include directory (else, it's the Linux kernel's /usr/include/sys/soundcard.h file that gets included, and the OSS-specific code of VLC v2.1 fails to compile).
I had to revert to VLC v2.0.9 since the chopped up audio/video at high CPU loads is clearly a show stopper, rendering VLC unusable.