Can't exec mplayer as a background process

Question

If I give a command like:

$ mplayer ~/sounds/mysound.wav

then it works and plays a sound. If I sleep before playing the sound, then it also works:

$ sleep 5s && mplayer ~/sounds/mysound.wav

However, if I try to sleep and make it a background process then it gives a cannot-connect-to-socket error:

$ sleep 5s && mplayer ~/sounds/mysound.wav &

I tried setting lirc=no in the mplayer config and that just caused the background process to hang. How can I get this to work?

Answer 1

I eventually figured this out. Apparently mplayer does a bunch of interface related things that cause the process to hang waiting for input. This can be curtailed with the -noconsolecontrols switch:

$ sleep 5s && mplayer -noconsolecontrols ~/sounds/mysound.wav &