I recently switched to pulseaudio and discovered the very same issue. MPlayer is setting the volume on playback start. I fixed it locally by changing libao2/ao_pulse.c. I also posted this to the mplayer-users mailing list but sadly it got not much attention. Check the link for details and a patch sugesstion: http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2009-October/077999.html Marcus
