multichannel audio device matching

[dddmmm]

I find with windows audio devices that don't have speaker config, ie most serious audio interfaces, the channel count set in windows device preferences needs to match the channel count in the audio output from vlc for anything to transmit. This is a royal bum ache because say for a 16 channel interface you have to repeatedly change the device preferences when the source changes. I see no reason why vlc shouldn't just pad out unused channels and fill the number of channels required. A may be missing something..

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Any serious audio device driver should be able to map standard audio configuration. That's not up to apps, per WASAPI design

[dddmmm]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by map configuration. I'm using professional rme drivers. If vlc sees a 16 channel device, surely it can pad out a 6 channel source, even if to 8 chans? Using ASIO might solve this, I see it may be possible to activate in vlc but I haven't tried yet.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

VLC can pad channels with zeroes using the trivial mixer. But under WASAPI, the audio driver must request a sensible channel map that's actually a superset of the source channel map for that to happen. And if the driver can do that, then it probably can do the padding, FWIW.

So if the driver can't provide a channel map, it can't work and that's a driver issue. VLC can't and won't redefine how WASAPI works.

[dddmmm]

I don't know the technical inners of Windows, but I do know the same drivers can play media files from Reaper with any number of audio channels over WASAPI, without driver reconfiguration. Also able to play 6 and 8 channel files from a browser with html5. So these apps must be working around the obstacles you mention.