MPV crashes completely when audio device in use

[chagos]

When a music player using WASAPI exclusive is active, and I try to open a video file with SMPlayer 18.5 using mpv, mpv.exe will crash and generate this error in the log:

error [ao/wasapi] Error initializing device: AUDCLNT_E_DEVICE_IN_USE (0x8889000a)
[ao/wasapi] Bad device retry failed
AL lib: (EE) ALCwasapiPlayback_resetProxy: Failed to initialize audio client: 0x8889000a
AL lib: (WW) alcSetError: Error generated on device 0CA18890, code 0xa001

While I fully expected that no audio would be produced, as having an already running music player in WASAPI exclusive would by definition exclude that, I expected to still see SMPlayer show the video-only track, as is the case with the other video players I use in the same circumstance, instead of a crash with no display. I tried adding the switch "--audio-fallback-to-null=yes" to the advanced parameters, which the mpv manual defines as:

"If no audio device can be opened, behave as if --ao=null was given. This is useful in combination
with --audio-device: instead of causing an error if the selected device does not exist, the client
API user (or a Lua script) could let playback continue normally, and check the current-ao and
audio-device-list properties to make high-level decisions about how to continue."

However the crash continues. Is this anything fixable on the SMPlayer end, or just a peculiarity of mpv.exe? If the latter, is there another switch/option I could try adding to the advanced options that would allow video to play without audio when the audio device is already in use? Thanks for any insight!