Audio Boost in mplayer

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I watch technical lectures from various sources, and often they have very quiet sound.  mplayer can boost the volume through software amplification, using one of two methods.

Note that if the input was recorded too softly, distortion when using software amplification at high gain is hard to avoid.  This will be particularly noticeable for any loud sounds or audio peaks.

Method 1: Use the software volume audio filter

mplayer -af volume=<gain>:<soft_clipping>   <filetoplay>

For a 20dB gain, without soft-clipping, use:

mplayer -af volume=20:0  <filetoplay>

Method 2: Use software mixing, and change the scale of the software volume scaler

mplayer -softvol -softvol-max 300

This commands mplayer to use software mixing, and to let the user increase the sound to 300% of the normal max.

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