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My previous attempt to fix mplayer sound problems only worked sometimes. I looked up mplayer's configuration log file 'configure.log' and found that mplayer had been compiled with OSS sound but not ALSA sound.
This is the fix. Get the latest mplayer source:
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
Install the necessary development libraries, in particular the one that contains the alsa sources:
apt-get install libasound2-dev libxv-dev libxinerama-dev libgtk2.0-dev
then:
cd mplayer make make install
It works now.