"avplay audio.wav" generates error: "Could not initialize SDL - Unable to open a console terminal"

Question

When I try to play an audio file using avplay on a raspberry pi3 running raspbian jessie, I get the following error.

pi@raspberrypi:~/sounds $ /usr/bin/avplay clip1.wav 
avplay version 11.9-6:11.9-1~deb8u1+rpi1, Copyright (c) 2003-2017 the Libav developers
  built on Apr 26 2017 06:57:28 with gcc 4.9.2 (Raspbian 4.9.2-10)
Could not initialize SDL - Unable to open a console terminal

I'm uncertain how to fix this. A google search on this error message did not turn up much of use.

I've tried ...

pi@raspberrypi:~/sounds $ /usr/bin/avplay -nodisp clip1.wav 
avplay version 11.9-6:11.9-1~deb8u1+rpi1, Copyright (c) 2003-2017 the Libav developers
  built on Apr 26 2017 06:57:28 with gcc 4.9.2 (Raspbian 4.9.2-10)
Could not initialize SDL - Unable to open a console terminal

and

pi@raspberrypi:~/sounds $ unset DISPLAY
pi@raspberrypi:~/sounds $ /usr/bin/avplay -nodisp clip1.wav 
avplay version 11.9-6:11.9-1~deb8u1+rpi1, Copyright (c) 2003-2017 the Libav developers
  built on Apr 26 2017 06:57:28 with gcc 4.9.2 (Raspbian 4.9.2-10)
Could not initialize SDL - Unable to open a console terminal

I installed this like so ...

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo apt-get install libav-tools 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
libav-tools is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 287 not upgraded.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ dpkg -l libav-tools
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                                    Version                  Architecture             Description
+++-=======================================-========================-========================-===================================================================================
ii  libav-tools                             6:11.9-1~deb8u1+rpi1     armhf                    Multimedia player, encoder and transcoder

Answer 1

A workaround may be to use sudo, e.g. /usr/bin/avplay clip1.wav. This error appears to occur when there's some sort of permissions error with /dev/console and/or /dev/tty* for the current user. sudo short-cuts around that, but isn't a proper fix.

I think the underlying configuration problem could be with PAM or systemd-logind, which are in charge of matching console permissions on login, but I don't know enough to track down the specific issue. (And it's difficult to do without the actual hardware and the fault on hand...) A newer version of Raspbian, either via update or reinstall may help.

Answer 2

Here is a solution:

pi@raspberrypi:~/sounds $ export DISPLAY=:0
pi@raspberrypi:~/sounds $ /usr/bin/avplay clip1.wav 
avplay version 11.9-6:11.9-1~deb8u1+rpi1, Copyright (c) 2003-2017 the Libav developers
  built on Apr 26 2017 06:57:28 with gcc 4.9.2 (Raspbian 4.9.2-10)
[wav @ 0x72400480] max_analyze_duration 5000000 reached
Input #0, wav, from 'samah-clip1.wav':
  Metadata:
    encoder         : Lavf57.71.100
  Duration: 00:00:13.02, bitrate: 352 kb/s
    Stream #0.0: Audio: pcm_u8, 22050 Hz, 2 channels, u8, 352 kb/s
^CALSA lib pcm.c:7843:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred f=0/0