[fbacher]

My wife and I love the old movies and TV shows recorded in mono (~2600 movies,~400 episodes). Most of the movies come from TCM which they broadcast as AC-3 with the mono being primarily in the center channel, although the other channels have some content at low volumes.

Problem: wife hates it . She prefers to have the sound come out of more (perhaps all) speakers. We are NOT looking for magically converting to stereo or surround, we just don't like it all coming out of the center speaker.

It seems other tools, like mplayer, vlc plays the mono equally on all speakers by default, Kodi, dutifully plays it as encoded.

I have played with settings on our AVR and I can make some improvement but it is not completely satisfactory and requires a lot of experimentation and voodoo. Ideally I would like Kodi to be configurable to deal with the mapping of audio content to physical equipment, that, however, seems unlikely to happen based on other postings that I have seen on this forum. I agree that dealing with audio is inherently complex. This particular problem is admittedly a messy problem, since the audio is AC-3, just not really. It would require kodi to detect that it is really mono, or allow me to manually flag the movie as mono.

Now that I have explained the problem are there any suggestions for how I might deal with it? I am not excited about the prospect of remuxing the audio manually. Perhaps there are some tools that I could somehow script into detecting the situation and then adding remuxing into the pipeline when I encode the movies using HandBrake.

Thanks for any suggestions.

And many, many thanks for Kodi.

[helta]

What happens when you enable "stereo upmix" in your audio settings from within Kodi?

[fbacher]

Doesn't help since there is some audio information on the other channels. Perhaps I'll have to remix the channels after Kodi? I do note that the audio from Kodi is the same as directly from the cable box.

[MrMC]

"stereo upmix" does not just drop the other channels, they get 'mixed' to form two channel.

[DJ_Izumi]

So, to be clear, this is a 5.1 stream that has silence in some of it's channels, as opposed to a AC-3 1.0 stream that only has one channel to start with? (Yeah, I've only ever encountered a 1.0 DD stream once, it's A Christmas Story, though I'm sure other examples exist)

[voltknuckle]

Hi all,

I'm curious about this, as well. We've got a bunch of old animation with mono audio streams. Kodi plays these through the center channel of our 5.1 setup, which seems accurate as far as I understand audio channels, but our center speaker is on the smaller side and we'd rather have the fronts do the heavy lifting. Enabling stereo upmix doesn't have any effect (I'm assuming because it only works with 2.0 streams).

I've been able to work around this by switching to all-channel stereo on our AVR, but it sounds a bit washed out playing over all 5.1. I'm wondering if there's a way to force Kodi to play 1.0 streams as 2.0, identical L+R stereo?