I just updated my laptop (which I mostly use for playing movie files) to
yesterday's -current. Previously I had a -current from about 5 months
ago.

However, now mplayer and xine are suffering from choppy playback. Not
right away, but after a few minutes. Pausing and unpausing fixes it -
for a few minutes.

Top shows plenty of idle time:

load averages:  0.24,  0.16,  0.18                  up 0 days,  1:33   00:54:40
43 processes:  1 runnable, 41 sleeping, 1 on processor
CPU states: 15.4% user,  0.0% nice,  1.0% system,  1.5% interrupt, 82.1% idle
Memory: 307M Act, 151M Inact, 6288K Wired, 36M Exec, 339M File, 1340K Free
Swap: 1030M Total, 1030M Free

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE   RES STATE      TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
  665 rhialto   85    0  9952K   18M RUN        2:08 20.90% 20.90% mplayer

It seems that selecting "sun" rather than "oss" audio avoids the
problem with mplayer (but not with xine). I remember that this used to
be necessary a long time ago, but then oss audio got somehow fixed.
Apparently, whatever was fixed about oss is now unfixed, or something
like that.

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert      -- You author it, and I'll reader it.
\X/ rhialto/at/xs4all.nl        -- Cetero censeo "authored" delendum esse.