MPlayer - Overcoming in-built low volumes of media files

Many times, the AVI files of movies end up with a very low audio volume causing a lot of pain for use with laptop speakers (esp like ThinkPad), which do not have a very wide range of volumes like headphones or traditional speakers. To overcome this issue, many media players provide an option to increase the volume more than 100% (upto 400% in case of VLC Media player).

After googling and RTFMing for a while I figured out that the way to do this in MPlayer is to use a software volume mixer instead of the soundcard's mixer. You can run mplayer with the following additional options

mplayer -softvol -softvol-max 400 

The 400 indicates that you want to increase the output by upto 400% of the base volume indicated in the media file.

This link has more information on using an audio filter instead of using a software volume mixer to do the same. Happy movie watching!!