FC5 sound problem

[Kevin J. Cummings]

Hi folks.  This one has me stumped.  I'm having problems with the sound
in .mpg files.  I didn't used to have this problem back in my FC2/FC3
days, so I'm not sure exactly when it broke.  Now I'm playing with
getting my video capture card working, and of course, it has a hardware
MPEG encoder on it, so none of the videos it produces have good sound.
Or at least, I can't get the sound right.

The Problem:
	Whenever I play *any* .mpg file (with mplayer for now), the sound comes
out scratchy and generally unclean.  These .mpg files used to play fine
when I originally downloaded them.

Not the problem:
	I have no trouble playing .wmv files.  The sound is crisp and clean.
Timidity/Festival work just fine.

My system:
	ABIT NF7-S2 mother board with onboard nForce AC97 sound chip:

> 00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation MCP2S AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a1)
>         Subsystem: ABIT Computer Corp. Unknown device 1c09
>         Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 3
>         I/O ports at d800 [size=256]
>         I/O ports at dc00 [size=128]
>         Memory at ef005000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
>         Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

	I'm using the snd_intel8x0 sound driver (and associated modules).

	I'm currently running the 2.6.16-1.2111_FC5 kernel, but I've tried
every FC5 kernel back to FC5 test1, all with the same results, so I am
unable to re-prove that it ever worked....   B^)

	My FC 5 system is up-2-date (with yum), and I'm banging my head against
the wall.  I originally thought it was the ivtv stuff I had installed,
or the mythtv stuff I was trying to get working, but when I discovered I
can no longer play *any* .mpg (MPEG-2) videos that I've had for years, I
am reverting to suspecting the sound drivers or mplayer.

	What to do next?

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)