Every now and then, I watch video clips with mplayer which is an excellent player.

A quick google points to an additional command line parameter such as follows,

mplayer -msglevel all=0 

But its a pain to add that if you use the GUI since its not in the settings menu. As it turns out the simple solution is just to add the msglevel parameter to mplayer’s config file, you can add this to /etc/mplayer.conf to affect all users or just ~/.mplayer/config in your home folder to only affect just your own user account. Just add the following line.

msglevel=all=0 

I encountered this problem when I first upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, when ever a sound should be a playing, one can only hear crackling sounds. It appears for some reason pulseaudio occasionally turns the pcm volume to 0 which causes pulseaudio to make the crackling sound when sound is played. I havent been able to figure out what caused it as its only happened once on upgrade and a second time out of the blue. It hasent happened since.

Solution is either to simply use gnome-volume-control, alsa-mixer or any other volume apps and increase pcm volume.

Just had my new Samsung la46a550 LCD tv for just under 2 weeks and I’ve been frantically searching for new firmware updates because of lots of issues such as

• Not as clear as it should be even on HD channels, google says its because samsung tvs make shit hdtv tuners. HDMI is ok though but not as clear as the smaller Sony Bravia I used to have.
• Irritating 200ms delay from sound out, Samsung fix this FFS

Anyway, it turns out after downloading and extracting the firmware from Samsung it turns out the firmware is STLinux based.

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