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When i'm playing a 5.1 movie, i only hear left and right channel. When there's sound from a rear channel, i hear absolutely nothing.

How do i set VLC to convert 5.1 to stereo, so that no sounds are missing?

PS I use PulseAudio.

2 Answers 2

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The two ways I have found until now are:

  1. to downmix the audio stream with an external utility (like eac3to at least on Windows), but the quality is not always good enough.
  2. use VLC version 2.1.3 or higher. http://www.vlc-forum.de/index.php/Thread/1423-Audio-5-1-Spur-zu-Stereo-Spur/ [in German] someone says that VLC downmixing became better.

http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=104214 shows that it is not possible to automatically downmix something with perfect quality - it seems that an audio engineer who corrects the volume of each channel is needed in some cases like yours.

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I'm using the WaveOut audio output under Preferences > All (Advanced) > Audio > Output Modules.

  1. Disable Dolby Surround in Preferences > Audio > Dolby Surround to Off, and uncheck Headphone surround effect, if checked.

  2. Under Preferences > All (Advanced) > Audio > Output Modules > WaveOut > set the Audio output channels to 2.

  3. Save and restart VLC.

Please note that Disabling Dolby Surround didn't have any effect, but changing the output channels down to 2 did, so I left it off.

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