Ok latest development...
I thought I'd fiddle around a little bit, so opened system monitor to see what was running. The only audio related thing I could see was pulseaudio (pulseaudio -D), so I thought I should try restarting this process.
Here's what I did from terminal:
sudo pulseaudio -k (...nothing happens)
pulseaudio --check (...nothing happens)
pulseaudio -k (pulseaudio disappears from system monitor - seems as though I had to
not be root to kill the process)
Then I tried "pulseaudio -D" and got:
Code:
W: core-util.c: setpriority(): Permission denied
"sudo pulseaudio -D" and got:
Code:
W: main.c: This program is not intended to be run as root (unless --system is specified).
E: main.c: daemon startup failed.
Then finally "sudo pulseaudio -D --system"
and pulseaudio pops back in to system monitor. I open VLC and voila, sound is working again!
To me, it looks like pulseaudio should be running as a systemwide process to work, but instead it was running at the user level (which is why I could only kill it initially as normal user but not as root). When I started it again as root with the system wide option things seemed back to normal (although I still had troubles using ALSA in mplayer, but OSS was ok. ALSA seems fine in VLC though.)
Anyway, obviously there is still a problem with my system and I don't want to run these commands everytime I log in. Not sure where-to from here though...
EDIT: After writing this I tried totem but still no sound there. Not sure how to set audio preferences in totem - there is nothing in the preferences dialogue.