[LINUX/MAC/WINDOWS] 5.1 Analog Output (6 Channel Discrete, not mirrored) Option?

I've just spent all day having a great time ripping a load of my HD-DVD's and blu-rays, no problems there I now have a nice collection of h264/VC1 with 6 channel flac included, which seem to playback great in 2 channel stereo (down mixing) so far as I can tell. What I'm wondering is, does anyone know if XBMC will let me use 6 channel analog output to send the audio straight to my amplifier without having to downsample it to dolby digital, or upgrade my amp to one that supports E-AC3 or Dolby TrueHD? I'm curious to know if this is supported before I spend a lot of money on hardware.

well, from my own rather crude testing (look at me, 3 sets of headphones at once!) I've found that XBMC does appear to correctly pass 6 channel flac to 6 channal analog output, so yay, at least on windows this seems to work. Now to pull the trigger and build a proper HTPC.

Freddo,
I would love to hear what kind of results you get after you build your new rig.

-Bahndit

we currently don't support 6ch analog output.

no, in the end I couldn't get it to work on linux, I don't know if it was alsa or drivers or xbmc or just sheer idiocy on my part.

it worked basicly out of the box on the windows port though, a teency bit of configuration in the realtek sound control panel and it worked right away.

elupus Wrote:we currently don't support 6ch analog output.

It is in the code though, just it's been manually forced to downmix to 2 channel because there's no GUI frontend. I've been able to get 5.1 to work fine simply by commenting this line out. Or at least it was in the last version I tried.

I hope to have a bit more of a look into how to write for xbmc and see if I can patch some sort of frontend addition. Never done anything with an oss project before though heh.

you need to comment out stuff in a few places actually. dts/ac3/aac decoder and alsa audio rendererer.

New feature request ticket on trac would be welcomed http://trac.xbmc.org see guidelines:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=What_is_XBMC...to_XBMC.3F

First off, I just found out that XBMC is being ported to Windows. I about pooped myself. I love everything about XBMC, it is exactly what I want/need.

I have searched the forums several times now and I'm not finding anyone talking about Multichannel OUTPUT. Many receivers have this feature, where you simply send every individual 5.1 channel to the receiver using stereo RCA cables, and all it does is amplify the signal. I use this setup since my receiver does not do matrixing well, and does not support ac3 (I dont think. when I tried all i got was PCM stereo).

Am I alone? did I miss something in the SPDIF settings that would allow me to pass 5.1 from AC3 MKVs to the receiver?

If I am not alone, would it be possible to add this audio output to the non XBOX versions of XBMC? I am assuming it doesnt currently exist because the XBOX only had optical/stereo analog outputs. but with PC sound cards, you have this multichannel option.

Thanks in advance, and keep up the good work!

This isn't currently officially supported, all audio is either down sampled to 2 channel analog or passed through for external decoding. However I have found that on the windows build at least, 6 channel flac is correctly passed through the 6 channel analog outputs, although to my knowledge this is infact a bug (6ch flac should be down mixed to 2ch stereo), I haven't dared raise it with the devs 'cos I don't want them to fix it lol.


.....shhhhh!