I am getting very low sound in linux today although almost all volume contrls are at maximum.

Its working fine in windows.

Is it a problem with mplayer?

Which other media player can I use in linux..

How do I detect my sound card and install drivers in Linux?

Try pressing "0" to volume up and "9" to volume down when running mplayer. Note, this is not the keys on your numeric pad (keys for numeric pad are "/" to volume up and "*" to volume down).

Hope this fixes your problem...

I have tried that. It doesnt work.

To bad that didn't work. Well, let's see:

I doubt it. However, I did, get some very low sounds with the movie "Return of the King" which used a very odd codec, but worked fine nonetheless. Try playing other formats (as mp3, avi, etc) with mplayer to see if this is a codec problem.

You could try XMMS, a mp3 player to see if it works. For Video, you could give Xine a shot too.

Redhat had two tools for configuring sound:

sndconfig and redhat-config-sound, which you could type at the terminal. Not sure if those tools were carried out with Fedora 2 (which I guess is the distribution you are using). I don't know which sound card you have either. Usually onboard ones can be tricky. Try running "alsaconfig" to set your sound card and "alsamixer" to change the volume rate.

Good luck!

No its the same problem with .mpg,.avi,.mp3,.dat formats.

The sound card is

VIA 8235

Chip:C-media Electronics CMI 9738

I have a very similar problem. All of my sound is barely audible except for CD output, which sounds fine.

I have that same VIA 82xx stuff. (it is built in to the motherboard) My other computer uses the same sound card, but it works fine with linux. I wish I had an idea of where to start. I have configured the sound section of the kernel a bunch of times. Most configurations prevent the sound server from even starting.

Is there a kernel patch somewhere?

well... run 'alsamixer' and up the DXS's sounds.... i hope it works...
i was in the same f*&ing problem and it solved....

Holy Crap, it worked!

I thought I had tried everything! Thanks oodles