Try to play with mplayer's volume, surprised to find the usual config file is NOT there any more and the name of the config file has also changed. N900 is a strange beast. The old mplayer.conf is now called config? The old location was at /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf, the new location? I put menu in config to /home/user/.mplayer/config and mplayer crapped out. Yike.
ao = pulse