I have installed mplayer in my computer. I use fedora 8. Now, when I am trying to open a movie, it shows the error message "[AO_ALSA] Unable to find simple control 'PCM',0". The movie is running. But the error message window is prompting up continiously. Can anyone suggest a solution?

I had this same problem last week.

what is your soundcard model?

try the following, worked for me...

open ~/.mplayer/gui.conf

'ao alsa mixer channel = "Analog Front"
'ao alsa device = "hw=0.0"

('Analog Front' is the main control channel for my sound card in alsamixer.)

I opened the .mplayer/gui.conf file but there was no option like 'ao alsa mixer channel' 'ao alsa device' . Do I need to add them? And how do I know what is the main control channel for my sound card in alsamixer?

are you using only mplayer or gmplayer? (the gui version of mplayer)

if your using just mplayer, try adding those alsa lines to either the system wide config file '/etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf' or the specific user config file '~/.mplayer/config'

if your using gmplayer then edit the users config file '~/.mplayer/gui.conf'

I use gmplayer because its easier. the file i mentioned in my first post was for gmplayer, but it just occured to me that you may not be using it

you should be able to find out the main channel in alsa mixer by lowering/increasing each channels level and seeing which one does that, then replace the 'Analog Front' with whatever the name of the channel is. you'll have to experiment with this, make sure you've got an mp3 playing in your media player while doing it.

Thanx bashyow. I don't know what happened earlier but just restarting my computer worked. I don't know what actually is happening. Nyways, thanx for your suggestions.