NOOB Dolby Digital 5.1 Help

[shahir]

Hi there

Apologies if this is a total N00B question. I am a filmmaker, who has just completed a short film which was mixed in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround.

Tomorrow night I am having a screening of my film at a commercial theatre, which will be projecting an MPEG-2 (*.mpg) file version of the film. The theatre uses VLC Media player for these types of digital screenings. We have encoded the file with Mpeg Layer 2 type audio, with no issues whatsoever.

However, we have managed another version with AC3 5.1 Audio multiplexed into the MPG. When I play this file in VLC, I can't seem to get any sound output out of the file whatsoever. (I've tried switching "Use S/PDIF where available" and force detection of Dolby Sound (I've also turned the Output module to Win32 WaveOut extension module).

When I play this MPG in Windows Media Player, I get sound, and the properties tab indicates that the audio is in fact "Dolby AC3 48000Hz 6ch 224Kbps [AC-3]"

So, any quick tips on how to get any sound out of this file? It doesn't seem to play out at the theatre either, so I figure there is some setting within VLC which will allow me to get sound?

Any help would be really appreciated, as the screening is tomorrow night, and I'd love to be able to present my film as it was mixed in the studio!

Many thanks

Shahir Daud
shahir.daud@gmail.com