Hello!

Relevant System specs: Ubuntu 9.04, DVICO Fusion HDTV7 Dual Express, Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Roadie USB sound card, Kaffeine Player (xine)

I'm trying to figure out how to get the 5.1 sound from an HDTV broadcast mixed down to 2.0 with this setup. I only have stereo speakers hooked to the PC right now. In the PulseAudio volume meter, I can see activity on all the 5.1 channels, but it appears that I am only getting Front Left and Front Right out of the two speakers (i.e. no Front Center or Rear Right/Left), so I end up missing quite a bit of audio.

In Windows XP, I would open up the Audio Advantage control panel, check 2-channel stereo output to get the downmix.

In the Kaffeine xine setup, there is a checkbox to mix 5.1 down to 2-channel stereo, but it doesn't seem to have any effect. I've looked through the PulseAudio volume controls and Manager GUI, but I'm not finding anything for downmixing.

Any suggestions? Is the downmixing done by the player, or by PulseAudio? I'm pretty new to Unbutu, so I'm probably missing something obvious.

Thanks for any help!

Try smplayer (http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/), a front-end to mplayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/), instead. Programs with AC3 audio play fine through the analog audio port on my computer (Intel motherboard audio). I think it also converts the AC3 tracks into Dolby ProLogic since I can hear the rear channels as well.

You can either install smplayer via a package manager like aptitude or synaptic, or add this repository (https://launchpad.net/~rvm/+archive/smplayer) to access the developer's most recent builds.

I used to use Kaffeine with the Xine engine since I run KDE-based distributions, but development of mplayer seems much more active these days, and smplayer is about as full-featured a player as anyone might want.

Try smplayer (http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/), a front-end to mplayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/), instead.

smplayer and mplayer appear to have issues with dvb in Ubuntu 9.04. There is a DVB CONFIGURATION IS EMPTY error in the mplayer log when trying to open an HDTV channel. I've searched the web and found many reports of this error, but haven't run across a solution. smplayer does seem nice, but I can't get it to work.

In Kaffeine, if I select asla for the audio device, it appears to downmix to 2.1.

Take a look at http://davidwinter.me.uk/articles/2008/02/09/dvb-and-mplayer/. There's also a whole mailing list (https://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/mplayer-dvb) devoted to using mplayer with dvb, though it's not in the friendliest of formats.

That said, I basically gave up trying to use my KWorld HDTV card with Linux because it wasn't worth the effort to get everything configured correctly. Other than live sports, we don't watch any OTA channels all that much, and everything else on my FiOS service is encrypted. I've also been less than impressed with PulseAudio, though it certainly has improved in recent months. If things work for you with ALSA, that's great.

That said, I basically gave up trying to use my KWorld HDTV card with Linux because it wasn't worth the effort to get everything configured correctly. Other than live sports, we don't watch any OTA channels all that much, and everything else on my FiOS service is encrypted. I've also been less than impressed with PulseAudio, though it certainly has improved in recent months. If things work for you with ALSA, that's great.

I was about to give up on the HDTV card in Ubuntu as well until I tried Kaffeine as a last resort. I wasn't expecting much, as I hadn't had good results with other xine-based players, but somehow, it works much better than the others I've tried.

PusleAudio is starting to grow on me.