mplayer dvd sound grating or absent (xine fine)

[Tom Killian]

>When I play a particular dvd I get either a loud grating sound with
>message about format ao being bad and something about big endian not
>supported in AC. Or I get a message that there is just no audio (and get

This happened to me with "Chicken Run".  Some DVDs seem to have a
Dolby multi-channel surround-sound track as the default audio, and
mplayer can't handle it.  If you run "mplayer -v ...", you'll see
(among other things) a list of the audio tracks and their
corresponding ids.  Pick one that mplayer understands and specify it
with the "-aid" option.