Alternative Alsa device in Mplayer
In general, pulseaudio manages my sound cards, but sometimes I want to play a video in mplayer
while playing music in mpd, but on different devices.
To discover the available cards:
julio@julio-acer ~> aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC269 Analog [ALC269 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC269 Digital [ALC269 Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
To change the device, just play the video using the -ao parameter as in the example:
- Sound through headphones:
mplayer Koyaanisqatsi (1982).mkv -ao alsa:device=hw=0.0 - Sound through the TV:
mplayer Koyaanisqatsi (1982).mkv -ao alsa:device=hw=0.3
More information at: Alsa
I’m a Brazilian computer engineer based in Germany, passionate about tech, science, photography, and languages.
I’ve been programming for about two decades already, exploring everything from mobile apps and web development to machine learning. These days I focus on cloud SRE and data engineering.
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