I have a home theater setup using an old TV without HDMI return, so movies on the computer go to a fairly new A/V amp via HDMI. The amp drives the speakers and feeds video to the TV.
It took me some time to figure out why I couldn't control the volume of some movies with my mouse scroll wheel but could others. Apparently, VLC passes through Dolby and DTS streams to the amp, but processes other streams itself. The scroll wheel works for the latter but not the former.
I've poked around in the preferences and searched the manual, but I don't see anything specific about passthrough vs. processing of digital audio. One help page says Dolby processing won't be available until version 4 of VLC comes out, suggesting that I'm stuck with no mouse control for A/52 and (I guess) DTS for the time being.
The mouse wheel responds much faster than the amp remote control, and I tend to fiddle with the volume a lot to hear some dialogue clearly or to avoid annoying the neighbors when Earth is bombing the aliens.
Computer OS is Win 10. I have no clear idea of what the majority of the advanced audio controls do, so I haven't fiddled with them. Bottom line questions are whether there's some way to use the mouse wheel as a volume control on all movie clips, and whether I'm correct in the reason why the wheel works on some videos and not on others.
Thanks.