intermittent playback on win XP for VLC 2.0.5

[needsleep]

I have an intermittent playback problem on Win XP using VLC 2.0.5.
I'm playing mp3, mp4 and flv files.
Everything was working fine until today. I updated Firefox plugins yesterday. That's the only system change.
I can play the files with Media Classic Home Cinema (sourceforge.net/projects/mpc-hc/) and do not get this issue.
When I play something in VLC, I get a dropout of sound about every 1/2 second, but it only lasts for a very tiny fraction of time.
So the sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back", is played as
"Th[no sound] quic[] rown []ox jum[]ed []ver []e laz[] ..." at the normal speed.

I tried reinstalling 2.0.5. No change.
The video does not seem to stop playing when the audio drops out, on an mp4 or flv file.
Please help me figure this out.

Thanks.

[bayonetta]

Had exactly the same issue on XP SP3 (looks like this is common in 2.0.5 Twoflower) and solved it (although I guess this is only a temporary workaround, not a real solution) by enabling Win32 waveOut as an Output Module in the Sound section of Preferences (you'll need to choose "Show All" in the Preferences panel to get to the detailed options). I found this fix somewhere on this forum by searching for "stuttering audio". The trouble is that for some video files (maybe it depends on the codec) this option disables VLC's own volume control so it has to be adjusted from the speakers.

The other workaround suggested (to install the 2.1 nightly) resulted in the sound disappearing completely from VLC. The Win32 waveOut option worked in this version as well.

[needsleep]

I tried the solution as outlined (with Win32 waveOut as an Output Module), but still had the issue. I back-revved to 1.1.11 and that did the trick. Thanks for your advice.

[TypX]

The other workaround suggested (to install the 2.1 nightly) resulted in the sound disappearing completely from VLC. The Win32 waveOut option worked in this version as well.

Disappeared? What did you do to reproduce that?

[bayonetta]

Many apologies for the (very) late reply. The sound disappeared from the 2.1 nightly with any other setting except the Win32 waveOut. Video played fine but there was no sound, and all sound files (MP3s, WAVs etc.) were completely mute. No idea why this happened - all I did was a clean install of the nightly version. As I mentioned, the sound worked again after going to Preferences and using the Win32 waveOut option.

At this moment I am using a clean install of VLC 2.0.7 Twoflower on Vista Home Premium and it is playing everything just fine, no choppy sound or any other problems. The choppy sound issues seem to be mostly related to XP (something to do with how XP handles hardware acceleration, maybe?). I haven't tried the new version of VLC on XP yet, but I'll install it to see what happens and report back.

[bayonetta]

Just installed 2.0.7 Twoflower on XP SP3. Seems to work perfectly using VLC's defaults.

For good measure, sound settings from the Control Panel can be checked to see if full hardware acceleration is enabled (Sounds & Audo Devices --> Audio --> Sound Playback --> Advanced --> Performance --> both Hardware Acceleration & Sample Rate Conversion Quality sliders should be set all the way to the right).