The audio drivers for my on-board soundcard are shit. I'm using Arch Linux and PulseAudio. VLC and Skype (but only these two) exhibit the problem of a crackling echo when playing sound which sometimes fixes itself. Since there's only two applications that exhibit this problem and

1) I don't care about sound quality on Skype

2) mplayer2 handles everything perfectly

3) My hardware is a crap on-board chip that's 5 years old and not made any more

I haven't been interested in pursuing a fix for this.

Also, mplayer2 does better upscaling with -vo gl:yuv=4:lscale=5:cscale=5