[LUNI] Getting audio from mplayer

[Mike Scott]

I installed the mplayer utility on Kubuntu and it seems there's nothing
it can't play.
I can now play video extracted from my Series-1 TiVo as well as all
those .wmv files my Windoze friends email to me. :-)

The one problem I had was if I ran as my user login, I didn't get sound.
This was because the audio device, for some reason, has the permission
bits set to:

crw-rw---- 1 root audio 14, 3 2007-04-21 13:52 /dev/dsp

So that the only people who can write to it are root and members of the
group 'audio'.
If I run as from a root console, I get audio, but no picture.  sudo
worked fine, but it's a pain to have to remember to type it each time.

So what I did, was make mplayer a member of the group 'audio' and set it
to run with the GID:

root at path:/usr/local/bin# chgrp audio mplayer
root at path:/usr/local/bin# chmod g+s mplayer
root at path:/usr/local/bin# ls -l mplayer
-rwxr-sr-x 1 root audio 8081024 2007-04-08 18:05 mplayer

I was wondering why the installation doesn't do this or is there a
glaring security hole here that I'm missing?  This is a home system, so
I don't necessarily need a DoD hardened system.

- Mike Scott