[MPlayer-users] Quiet AC3 with 2-speaker setup

[Kurt Maute]

> First off, I want to thank the developers for their hard work.  

Ditto.  MPlayer rules!

> MPlayer can
> play pretty much anything I throw at it, and it's supremely useful on my
> set-top box.  I've been using it to rip some of our DVDs to hard drive for
> posterity (we've got a small child in the house, and I'd rather not buy the
> same DVD multiple times because of breakage/scratches/random acts of
> jelly.), and I've run into a bit of a snag with AC3 5.1 audio.  My set-top
> box and desktop are both connected to recievers via a standard 1/8" stereo
> plug -> 2 RCA cable, running from the motherboard's onboard sound card.
> When I rip a DVD, I'm using -aid 128, which is generally the English 5.1
> track, and I'm using -oac copy, so the full audio information is getting
> preserved in the resulting .avi.

> The output volume is very quiet.  If I turn up the stereo loud enough to
> hear dialog, I start getting a lot of background hiss.

I've noticed the same thing, though normally I rip DVD's so I can view
them on my laptop when I'm traveling (battery life is much better
reading the HD than spinning a DVD, and I can travel lighter).  I play
the ripped VOB with DIVX player, so the issue isn't unique to playback
via MPlayer.

One solution is to encode the audio to MP3, but like you said, then you
end up losing the ability to play it in 5.1.  Pardon my ignorance, but
I'm wondering if there's a way to store both audio streams in the VOB so
we can choose on playback?

-- 
Kurt Maute <kurt at maute.us>