There is a package called Gnome-mplayer, which is a graphical front-end to mplayer that works nicely in Gnome. The only thing is that you will probably want to go into its preferences menu, and on the "advanced" tab, enable the option for software volume. Otherwise, it will tend to crank up the audio to ear-splitting levels. You can also use the command-line version in a terminal, but you will want to either specify "-quiet" to turn of the status line, or turn off speech. BTW, Gnome-mplayer can be found at: http://dekorte.homeip.net/download/gnome-mplayer
