[MPlayer-users] 6 channel bug?

[Jeffrey Hammel]

Hello,

I believe I mentioned I had the Creative Inspire 5700 Digital speakers, so
the outupt is digital (I tried + wanted to use hardware AC3 pass through,
but get a bunch of noise.  However, this is not an mplayer problem.) I.e.
2 front, 2 rear, center, subwoofer.  Using
-channels 6, the center channel works fine.  In fact, everything sounds
beautiful except the "dialogue" portion of the audio.  It is present, but
extraordinarily faint.  My hardware audio routing is fine.  If it makes a
difference, I am using the Digital DIN output of the audigy.  Everything
else seems to work fine.  On the other hand, I haven't tried any other
surround except for DVDs (mplayer & ogle) since I don't know what else has
5.1 surround (any suggestions here?)

BTW, I am using 0.90pre1 at the moment (can give compiler options, if
necessary, but all the audio options were the defaults).  I can DL the CVS
version, if there's any chance the problem (?is it a problem?) has been
fixed.  But as I haven't seen any documentation of this, I assume that I'm
the only one to encounter it.

It could be the case that the flaw is with the opensource.creative.com
drivers, and not mplayer.  Again, without having a good way to test
surround sound, it is difficult to tell.  I have ac3 pass through enabled
in the driver (+ digital output + multichanncel).  Any insight would be
appreciated.  I'll play with it more when I get the chance.

Jeff Hammel

> Message: 16
> Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 10:30:06 +0100 (BST)
> From: Stephen Davies <steve at daviesfam.org>
> To: mplayer-users at mplayerhq.hu
> Subject: Re: [MPlayer-users] 6 channel bug?
> Reply-To: mplayer-users at mplayerhq.hu
>
>
>
> On Sun, 21 Apr 2002, Jeffrey Hammel wrote:
>
> > [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> > I just compiled mplayer.  Playing DVDs seems fine in stereo mode, but the
> > language portion of audio seems to nearly disappear when I use the
> > -channels 6 option.  Is this a bug? Or am I missing something [tried to
> > read as many docs as possible before mailing].  Also note that using
> > -channels 4 works, but sounds horrible.  I have also tried
> > mplayer -aop list=surround, and it seems to work.  Is this, in fact, what
> > I want?
>
> Hi,
>
> You didn't say what speaker arrangements you have.  I assume that you are
> using analogue output from your Audigy to your speakers?  How many
> physical speakers do you have?
>
> Using -aop list=surround when playing DVDs results in the AC3 code
> downmixing the audio to matrix surround sound, and then the surround
> plugin dematrixing the audio back into 4 channel sound.
>
> So that will provide some surround effect, but it's not the best way to
> hear DVDs.  (OTOH, many ripped video files have surround audio, in which
> case the surround plugin is the right thing to use).
>
> As for DVD audio and the ac3 decoder - the "channels" switch should be all
> that the decoder needs to make the right output mix.
>
> Using -channels 6, the symptoms are that your centre channel isn't
> working.  Are you sure that your audio routings are right, and that your
> LFE and centre channel speakers are connected the right way round?  You
> might want to try connecting your front left and right pair to the
> lfe/centre output on your card and see if you then hear centre dialogue
> from one of them.
>
> I'm not sure about the distorted -channels 4 output.  Mine works right but
> I'm not so up to date with the CVS at the moment.
>
> Regards,
> Steve
>