I get choppy sound and video when playing .dv files either with Kaffeine or mplayer (less so with mplayer). Running mplayer in a konsole I get the following message

-------------------------------
************************************************
**** Your system is too SLOW to play this! ****
************************************************

Possible reasons, problems, workarounds:
- Most common: broken/buggy _audio_ driver
- Try -ao sdl or use the OSS emulation of ALSA.
- Experiment with different values for -autosync, 30 is a good start.
-------------------------------
when I try mplayer with -ao sdl the choppiness goes away but I get no sound.
Configuration - HP Pavilion laptop with onboard sound SB400 AC97 Audio Controller SuSE 10.2 x86-64

In some Linux Distro's, the default sound level is "mute". Requiring the audio sound to be started by adjusting the appropriate settings on both the audio mixer and the volume control or possibly one or the other.