No Audio from media players

[JD]

I can get audio when I play  videos  on firefox (youtube, ...etc).
But vlc and mplayer issue this message into ~/.xsession-error

Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_r300.so: cannot open shared object 
file:
No such file or directory
Running DIL (3.6.0) Version
DtsDeviceOpen: Opening HW in mode 0
DtsDeviceOpen: Create File Failed
ALSA lib pulse.c:243:(pulse_connect) PulseAudio: Unable to connect: 
Connection
refused

Also, there is no pulseaudio daemon running.
Tried to  start it but got:
$ pulseaudio --start
E: main.c: Daemon startup failed.