The VideoLAN Forums

Hey guys,

today, I bought a small 5.1 surround system and hooked it up to my 7.1 sound card (nVidia Corporation MCP61 High Definition Audio). It's my first time with 5.1 sound: so far, I always used stereo. I'm on Ubuntu Jaunty 64 bit.

I've been toying around with this a bit, but I can't get the 5.1 sound to play back correctly in VLC Media Player. When I type

speaker-test -Dplug:surround51 -c6 -l1 -twav

in the terminal, all sound is played back correctly from the speakers/subwoofer, but in VLC, when using this test AVI...

http://www.tfm.ro/ac3/

...I don't get the correct sound. The center is fine, but all variations of left and right come from both front, back and LFE (left and right respectively). Basically, what I get is stereo, piped through Left Front/Back, Center and Subwoofer, and Right Fron/Back respectively. This happens in both ALSA and Pulse.

How did you set up your 5.1 sound with VLC in Ubuntu?

Thanks!!

If you set your audio device to 5.1 then you'll get proper output.

Getting vlc to automatically pick 5.1 may be a different story, in windows it will, on ubuntu it seems you have to wait till the video is loaded

Either there's a setting I'm missing (good possibility) or it's more a function of your audio driver than vlc itself

maybe there's something to be done in pulse which I don't use (8.04 here

I just use the global hotkey (shift+a) to cycle once the video is loaded (if you're using the jaunty repo vlc then there may be no global hotkeys, but available as a hotkey or audio -> audio device -> ....

Thanks! I got it to work in the meantime... It was just a matter of endlessly fiddling around with the settings. Here's the setup that now works for me (pretty straightforward, actually):

- First, select "All" in "Show Settings" in the options menu
- Under "Audio", I have "High Quality Audio Resampling" enabled (it is by default, I think)
- "Use S/PDIF when available" is disabled
- "Peak Protection" disabled, too

- The selected Audio output module is "ALSA audio output"
- In the sub-options of "Output modules", I selected "HDA Nvidia: ALC888 Analog (hw:0,0)" as my ALSA Device Name
- Under "OSS", I enabled "Try to work around buggy..."

Now I can select "5.1" from the Audio Device menu when playing back a DVD, and it works.
Thanks again!