The audio drivers for my on-board soundcard are shit.
I'm using Arch Linux and PulseAudio.
VLC and Skype (but only these two) exhibit the problem of a crackling echo when playing sound which sometimes fixes itself. Since there's only two applications that exhibit this problem and
1) I don't care about sound quality on Skype
2) mplayer2 handles everything perfectly
3) My hardware is a crap on-board chip that's 5 years old and not made any more
I haven't been interested in pursuing a fix for this.
Also, mplayer2 does better upscaling with -vo gl:yuv=4:lscale=5:cscale=5
1) I don't care about sound quality on Skype
2) mplayer2 handles everything perfectly
3) My hardware is a crap on-board chip that's 5 years old and not made any more
I haven't been interested in pursuing a fix for this.
Also, mplayer2 does better upscaling with -vo gl:yuv=4:lscale=5:cscale=5