S/PDIF 5.1 channel mixer?

[Lomax]

Hi all,

I'm generally very happy with my home cinema set-up, except for one minor niggle; due to space constraints I need to use a "phantom centre" channel, which when enabled turns off the centre channel level control on my amplifier. But this makes the dialogue a little too low compared to the effect channels - this is particularly annoying at night; to hear the dialogue the effects have to be so loud that I fear annoying the neigbours! In fact, at night it would be useful to tilt the audio balance in the opposite direction, making centre louder than it normally would be. Since I cannot individually control the phantom centre sound level on my amp it would be great if there was a way to control the individual channel levels in VLC, before the audio gets passed through to S/PDIF out (yes, I do realise that this is counter to the "passthrough" concept!). I've spent some time searching the web but haven't been able to find anything, so I come here to see if anyone has any tips?

Edit: I'd be perfectly happy with system level (ALSA) channel mixing, if it's not possible to do this in VLC. In fact that might be preferable!

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

You can configure ALSA to do that using remapping and A52 encoder output. Don't ask me how, I am not familiar with ALSA syntax.