VLC/MPlayer/Miro defaults to pulseaudio which always crashes on Ubuntu Hardy

I hate ESD. I strongly dislike artsd. I was intrigued by NAS, but then I used it for a while. The idea of a sound server seems so appealing, but nobody appears to be able to get it to work, and least of all the PulseAudio people.

Of course I'm being too harsh here, but I'm royally fed up with sound not working out of the box like it should. It's 2008. People have farted on the Moon. How hard can it be to replay recordings of that on bog standard laptop?

It appears to my untrained eye that mplayer, vlc and miro all default to using PulseAudio on Hardy. It further appears that the PulseAudio server is not installed by default, at least not in Xubuntu. This gives rise to the royally entertaining snippets:

Mplayer:

AO: [pulse] Failed to connect to server: Connection refused


MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: ao2_init
- MPlayer crashed by bad usage of CPU/FPU/RAM.

VLC:

bind: No such file or directory
*** PULSEAUDIO: Unable to connect: Connection refused
gxine has suffered a fatal internal error.
To get a backtrace, run gxine in a debugger such as gdb.

Miro:

INFO     Playing item with renderer: 
WARNING  downloader: connection closed -- quitting
INFO     Shutting down downloaders...
Segmentation fault

Is Linux ready for the mainstream? Is Ubuntu?

Anyway, the solution to the above problems are:

1. sudo nano /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf

   And rewrite the ao= to

   ao=alsa
   

2. sudo rm /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.20/xineplug_ao_out_pulseaudio.so

Less cautious people than myself might instead add a ~/.mplayer/config with containing ao=alsa and rename, instead of remove, the pulseaudio support from the libxine1-misc-plugins package. But that's less cautious people.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster help you if you decide to go the other route: install PulseAudio. Despair, delirium and dismay lies down that path, and nothing else.