[vlc] Mac OS X, VLC and surround sound

[Carsten Whimster]

Hello, and my apologies in advance for the limited-interest question,

I am running the latest version of Mac OS X, 10.3.8, on a brand-new 
dual cpu PowerMac, the latest VLC, 0.8.1, and have just bought a nice 
soundcard (M-Audio Revolution 7.1 with 1.2.9 drivers), hoping to get 
surround sound for DVD playback as well as games.

However, I have noticed some odd behaviour with VLC, perhaps a buglet 
or two as well, although it is also possible that one or more of the 
problems is with my soundcard drivers.

I have opened the preference app for my soundcard (with Creative FPS 
1500 speakers for now, which have a 4.0 setup, although there is also a 
subwoofer without a separate plug), and in this preference app, I can 
see in realtime what the sound levels being sent to the card are. Then 
I start VLC and put in some recent DVD with 5.1 sound (such as Harry 
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), and often, it initially works 
well. However, the rear right channel often drops out if i fiddle with 
any of the settings. Additionally, I have had the sound drop out 
completely. Even when the sound comes through all four channels, I 
often get very weird assignments, speaker-wise, such as the voices 
coming out of only the rear left speaker. The general feel of the sound 
is rarely the same between the DVD menu and the movie itself, and I 
don't mean only volume levels.

So far, the only way I can get a reasonable, repeatable DVD viewing 
experience is to revert to Mac OS X's DVD Player, which is obviously 
not great, given the lack of support for 5.1 decoding.

I have tried searching in the FAQ and in the history of this list, but 
have not found anything directly related. There were some issues with 
older versions of VLC which sounded possibly tangentially related, but 
nothing has solved my problem so far. If I missed anything, I would be 
grateful for any pointers to related material.

Does anyone here have any experience setting up VLC with surround sound 
on Mac OS X? I am quite willing to help someone with an extensive 
debugging session, running custom versions of VLC or whatever it takes 
to diagnose the problem.

Thanks in advance for any tips.

Carsten Whimster

-- 
This is the vlc mailing-list, see http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
To unsubscribe, please read http://www.videolan.org/support/lists.html