Cannot get 5.1 sound in Ubuntu (9.04 Jaunty 64-bit) :-((((

[The Bright Side]

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!!

[mc2man]

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 -> ....

[The Bright Side]

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!