[msaspence]

Just recently my xbmc seems to be filtering out the dialog of mkvs
The background music/ambient noise come out loud and clear
other codecs work fine

Some (hopefully) helpful info:
1. rev 22516
2. windows 7 rc1
3. pentium R dual core 2.5hz
4. 2gb ram
5. nvidia geforce 8400 gs driver: 8.15.11.9038
6. creative sb audigy 2 driver: 6.0.1.1241

[joshuass]

Check what audio stream is in the MKV
Some encoders like to encode AC3/DTS streams to AAC 5.1

AAC 5.1 is not an audio stream that receivers can handle natively. XBMC does not encode them back to DTS or AC3 on the fly, either. The easiest way to test this is to check "downmix to stereo" and see if the dialog comes through.

Most dialog in a multichannel sound stream is heard through the center speaker. So if you don't down mix you are really only getting the left and right channels.

For the future, if you want to avoid this problem, don't encode in AAC5.1 or grab videos that are encoded in AAC 5.1. Checking downmix to stereo will mix everything to stereo so you can still atleast watch what you have already in your library.