Sound problem (mplayer/sid)

[Victor Munoz <vmunoz@macul.ciencias.uchile.cl>]

Hello. Sometimes I've had an annoying problem when using mplayer (currently
using 1.0pre3-3.3.3) in sid. The basic problem is that I eventually lose the
sound while watching streaming video. Killing mplayer, and trying to
unload/load sound modules with modconf does not work, since 'device or
resorce busy', and I don't know what is the problem, since mplayer is the
only program trying to use sound. My only solution is to reboot. Is there a
cleaner way?

A typical situation in which this happens is after succesfully watching
streaming video for over an hour (like yesterday!), data download gets
slower. That could be a server problem (I started watching at about 7pm,
Chilean time, and then problems appeared at about 9pm, when probably more
people was connecting to the server). Since the video stopped, I killed
mplayer, restarted it, but then I could not get sound. I usually have to
kill and restart mplayer, and I don't have this problem. So the thing is,
rather than trying to identify the cause of the sound problem, I'd like to
recover sound without rebooting. 

Regards,

						Victor