[plug] realplayer and via onboard audio

[Craig Ringer]

Hi
Quick question: anyone know why I get awful garbage audio (not static, 
vaguely resembles original amped up and filtered for more distortion than any 
human can fully comprehend) from RealPlayer? Even their "welcome" sound does 
it. XMMS, esdplay, play, mpg123/321, etc are all fine. RealPlayer doesn't 
even do the same thing every time. Realplayer works on my home machine (sb 
live) also running sid and with a similar config.

When playing through ESD, the sound gets "crunched" into a smaller timeframe 
sometimes, while other bits stretch out or repeat a tiny fragment so it 
"buzzes". Sometimes it works. Sometimes it starts/finishes partway through. 
But its a lot more intelligible than without esd.

Ideas anybody?

I'd love to use anything else but realplayer (something that says "whoops 
cant open /dev/dsp" instead of "I'll freeze 'till you kill -9 me" for 
example) but don't know of anything that  handles the format.

I've got a built-in
VIA Technologies, Inc. AC97 Audio Controller (rev 50)

running the via82cxxx_audio kernel for the driver.