On a whim, I went back and re-did everything related to sound since installing centOS v4.4. That did the trick.
It appears from what I did that the following is true:
-
ALSA needs to be re-compiled and re-installed if the kernel sound changes. The kernel has minimal alsa content built in so most likely I will need to maintain a leading-edge alsa build alongside the kernel.
-
MPlayer needs the same tender loving care for sound and
ALSA changes.
- Early versions of kernel 2.6 and
ALSA did not support the NVIDIA sound.
So when a later version of kernel 2.6 (I'm up to 2.6.9-42.0.3) was installed,
ALSA became incompatible. Further, the on-board sound became available and I didn't know it.
By updating everything, the desktop volume control now shows three mixer devices: Intel ICH (on-board),
Bt878 (video capture), and
SBLive!. It's up to each program to connect to these available outputs.
XMMS has a nice built in configuration tool to select either the built-in or
SBLive! Everything else finds the built-in, via alsa-oss (I think...Not sure about this point). The video capture does not appear to have a software path down the PCI so sound jumper goes to the built-in board line-in controlled by "line-in" on the ICH mixer.
FlashPlayer works nicely through the built-in.
NOTE: I did NOT install
NVIDIA sound driver, though I did install
NVIDIA ethernet and
NVIDIA video drivers.
Now that everything works, I'm reluctant to change modprobe.conf. Normally, alsaconf and alsactl combine to make these changes. I did not use them. Below is my final modprobe.conf
# modprobe.conf
alias usb-controller ehci-hcd
alias usb-controller1 ohci-hcd
alias eth0 nvnet
alias forcedeth off
alias scsi_hostadapter sata_nv
# ALSA portion. Video capture is card 1. SBLive! is card 2.
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-card-0
alias snd-card-1 snd-emu10k1
#module options should go here
# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
#card #1.
#alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
#alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
#alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
#alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
#alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
#card #2. Don't know if this change needed.
alias sound-service-1-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-1-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-1-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-1-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-1-12 snd-pcm-oss
