Multichannel Audio Support

[crabman]

Elisa currently doesnt seem to support multichannel audio playback.

Playback an audio or video file containing multichannel audio on a multichannel audio system
(e.g. this one with 5.1 ac3 audio: http://www.tfm.ro/ac3/)

what should happen?
every speaker should be addressed discretely

what happens?
the 5.1 signal is mixed down to stereo

I propose including a way to tell elisa what type of sound system is connected so multichannel audio can be played correctly. This could be in the GUI or in the config file. I think this is crucial to a home cinema system.

crabman

tested with elisa 0.5.8 on kubuntu linux 8.04
(playback also tested with xine and mplayer - everything worked)

********edit********
I forgot to mention that this only appears when using alsa directly, with pulseaudio everything woks fine.

[Andrea Cimitan (cimi)]

With pulseaudio elisa works with 5.1 channel?
I'm quite interested...

[Andrea Cimitan (cimi)]

That's true, pulseaudio is doing some mixing, BUT alsa/gstreamer support without pulseaudio is much better. Pulseaudio crashes and it is always another dependency, without counting that pulseaudio is usually set up for stereo channels on distributions