Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Increasing mplayer volume beyond 100%

I had to recompile my mplayer from source because my recent update using apt-get was not working properly with my graphics card. While doing so i found out lot of very useful features in mplayer that can be used. In players like VLC player you can increase volume upto 400% i thought you cannot do this on mplayer. This would specially help you if you are using a laptop speaker, which generally produce very less volume.

Here are some of useful options:

-softvol ( it uses the software mixer instead of your sound card. So it helps you in increasing the volume above 100% )

-softvol-max <10.0-10000.0> ( you can specify a range between 10 and 10000 - So actually i am using value as 400. So i can increase volume upto 400% . Increasing the volume above )

-display ( this might be useful when you work on a VNC or a remote machine. It ll display the output on another machine. )



You can also put all these configurations in the config file: ( ~/.mplayer/config )

# Write your default config options here!
softvol=1
softvol-max=400
#stop-xscreensaver=1
zoom=1
vm=1

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That sounds exactly what I'm looking for, where do I get Softvol?

Arula said...

Jamie,
you can enable softvol by passing -softvol=1 when you run mplayer.

example:

mplayer -softvol=1 -softvol-max=400 "video/audio file"

But my recommendation would be set these options in the configuration file in ~/.mplayer/config file.
Add these lines in the file :

softvol=1
softvol-max=400

- Arula

VM said...

Thanks a ton buddy. That was a great help.

One more comment, after this change when you start mplayer, it starts with the same volume level but now you will have an option to increase the volume to the value you entered in the parameter.

Thanks again.