[MPlayer-users] 4-speaker support

[Stephen Davies]

Hi,

Just saw this thread on >2 speaker analogue output.

I've just been looking at this right now.

"Stock" emu10k1 driver does as you say, Felix: sends the stereo pair to
both the front and read speaker outputs.

However - with the CVS OSS driver and the associated tools there's a
heap more "neat stuff" that can be done.

# password is cvsguest
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:cvsguest at opensource.creative.com:/usr/local/cvsroot login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:cvsguest at opensource.creative.com:/usr/local/cvsroot co  emu10k1

The functionality certainly includes at least mapping /dev/dsp1 to the
rear speakers.  I presume the kernel driver will do this and you just need
the emu-dspmgr to make the mapping.

But since July, Eduard Hasenleithner implemented analogue multichannel
playback in the driver - which provides capability to drive all 6 analogue
output channels on the 5.1 card.  At a cursory glance at the docs you call
SNDCTL_DSP_CHANNELS with (say) 6, and then you just write /dev/dsp with a
6 channel "interleaved" audio stream.

I'm certainly going to experiment with this - should enable ProLogic
decoding and 5.1 playback out of mplayer with no external kit, which would
really rock.

Steve