[meltice]

While I set "Speaker Configuration" to 5.1, MP3(stereo audio) outputed to only Front-Left and Front-Right speakers.

I was trying the recent SVN build XBMC on WinXP SP3 and found the audio setting was frustrating. Don't know if this is going to be fixed in 10.05 official release.

There is a "Audio Output - Speaker Configuration" setting, which I think is unnecessary on Windows platform for analog audio output. Here are my test result. I've set the sound card for 5.1 analog output. I prepared 2 wma files with 2.0 and 5.1 audio channels for testing. I tested on VLC and XBMC with different settings. VLC was doing great without touching anything. XBMC was problematic. You will have to know how many audio channels are in a file and set the corresponding "Speaker Configuration" in order to get the desired behavior.

[HTML]>> VLC
wma file | sound card set 5.1 | output
2.0 - all 6 output
5.1 - all 6 output, TRUE 5.1

>> XBMC
wma file | xbmc speaker config | sound card set 5.1 | output
2.0 2.0 - all 6 output
2.0 5.1 - only 2 output, front left and front right
5.1 2.0 - all 6 output, downmix then upmix, NOT TRUE 5.1
5.1 5.1 - all 6 output, TRUE 5.1[/HTML]

[ubuntuf4n]

mp3s are only mono/stereo.
if you set xbmc to 2.0 then xbmc will play stereo sound from all speakers (even if they're a lot), but if you set it to 5.1 then it will only play the stereo lines.
that mean only 2 speakers will play.

true 5.1 from a mp3--> not possible.

[therealjoeblow]

As noted, with analog output via your sound card, you're going to need a decoder that can simulate 5.1 from a stereo source. Some are good at it, some are not. XBMC isn't great.

Best solution is to output digital audio to an external AVR that has Dolby Prologic IIx (Music) capability (pretty much all of them do these days), which will do the best the industry can do in this respect. And there's a *big* difference between just "playing" the sound over all 6 speakers and actually using a programming algorithm to disect the sound and simulate 5.1 from it.

Other options for analog output are motherboards with DTS Neo:6 integrated into their onboard sound chips (usually the higher end Realtek ones) or newer sound cards with the same processing that can be setup do this automatically.

Cheers
The REAL Joe

[meltice]

In Windosws XBMC, I think while the "Speaker Configuration" was set to 5.1 analog output, it will always output 6 channels audio to the DirectSound device. The problem is when you play stereo sources under this configuration, XBMC outputs audio to only Front-Left and Front-Right channels and leaves the other 4 channels empty (I guess).

For other normal Windows applications, they output stereo audio sources to the DirectSound device as 2 channels audio, and then the underlying software/drivers will automatically output/expand the 2 channels audio to 4.1/5.1/6.1/7.1(whatsoever) ... speakers depending on the Control Panel settings.

That's why I think the "Speaker Configuration" in Windows XBMC for analog audio output is unnecessary. I think XBMC can just output whatever numbers of audio channels to the DirectSound device and let the underlying driver do the job.

[meltice]

OK. This issue seems only to be existed in recent SVN trunk. I found this one worked for me.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=512409&postcount=3
But not perfect. Revision 28019 worked for WMA Pro 5.1 audio files (True 5.1 output), but didn't work for DTS 5.1 MKV video files (no sound from rear speakers). All stereo files were played normally from ALL 6 speakers. Hope all issues get fixed in the official release.