MPlayer Video Stream Lagging Audio

On my (somewhat older) laptop, I've noticed that MPlayer sometimes gets the audio and video out of sync. The audio is moving faster than the video. I've noticed this in octoshape streaming as well as in playing standalone videos.

I discovered a quick fix to this is to use the d hotkey on the keyboard. This toggles between frame dropping modes. By default mplayer tries to draw every frame it receives, but toggling to either framedropping enabled or framedropping hard can help keep the video up with the audio track. I've found this has made my octoshape streams usable again! (Usually I just make use of the framedropping enabled instead of the hard setting. (I haven't investigated the difference between the two.)