Can I make audio with only one stereo channel play through both speakers?

Question

Some videos have stereo audio, but audio only plays out of one channel (only plays out of left speaker or only out of right speaker). Unfortunately, remixing these to mono with something like ffmpeg is not an option. Is there any way to make Ubuntu play the left stereo channel through both speakers (and vice versa, when necessary)?

Answer 1

It will depend very much on what video playback application you are using. This is very easy to accomplish using mplayer, for example:

$ mplayer some_file.avi -af channels=1

Answer 2

If you use VLC, when watching a video, right click the screen and you can select from pure stereo, of just a single channel, to be treated as the audio for the track.