What I am shooting for is to utilize the multichannel input on my receiver
so I can experience the sound in movies encoded with Dolby 5.1. I have
both DVDs and divx/xvid/ac3 avi files.

Hardware:
ATI AIW Pro(circa 1998!) - I use the video out to display to my TV.
SB Live LS Model sb0229
Sony str-de597 6.1 receiver;

Software:
Slackware 10.0, 2.4.26 kernel bare.i, basically a straight full install.

When I run 'mplayer file/dvd -channels 6 -vo vesa ' from a console I
cannot get full sound with either OSS or ALSA.

With OSS emu10k1, I get front and center/lfe but no surround.

With ALSA I get front and surround but no center/lfe. I can see the lips
moving but no dialog. I tried '-af alsa surround51' with mplayer as well.

I have been in Google for two days and it is littered with problems about
the SB Live.

For OSS the only thing I could find was an emu-tools on sourceforge and it
wouldn't make. Makes you wonder who is using this nowdays since the
sources were dated 2002. Yes, I fixed the sources(as10k1.c and debug.c)
so they would make. Anyone have a /usr/local/etc/emu10k1.conf to share....?

For ALSA, what little I have seen for solutions are to mute this and
unmute that and set this volume to zero or you will get clipping and so
on. Not once has this matched what I see in alsamixer. I did not
count, but there must be nearly 50 'controls' in alsamixer. Anyone
have an /etc/asound.state file to share......? I also tried version 1.07.

It seems odd that a common card like the SB Live could be so difficult to
set up.

John wrote:
>
> For ALSA, what little I have seen for solutions are to mute this and
> unmute that and set this volume to zero or you will get clipping and so
> on. Not once has this matched what I see in alsamixer. I did not
> count, but there must be nearly 50 'controls' in alsamixer. Anyone
> have an /etc/asound.state file to share......? I also tried version 1.07.

I am not using Alsa, but for what it's worth, go to the project page
directly,
check the Alsa WIKI page:
http://alsa.opensrc.org/
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=FAQ009
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=emu10k1 (lots of info...)

-nabis

On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 08:50:04 +0000, nabis wrote:
> I am not using Alsa, but for what it's worth, go to the project page
> directly,
> check the Alsa WIKI page:
> http://alsa.opensrc.org/
> http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=FAQ009
> http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=emu10k1 (lots of info...)
>
> -nabis

If what I need is in those links I can't see it. Are you aware of
something specific in there that I need to see or understand better?

John wrote:
>
> If what I need is in those links I can't see it. Are you aware of
> something specific in there that I need to see or understand better?
>

Not really, just saw those tips on twicking alsa-mixer as well as links
to enother sources of information. Sorry.
Also the description of your card (sb0229) did not return any results in
the search, could you `cat /proc/pci' or `dmesg | less' to find out how
Linux sees it.

-nabis

Answering my own question...

I stumbled into a solution.

Using mplayer 1.0pre5 and alsa 1.05, use this command to play a file or
DVD with AC3 Dolby 5.1 audio:
mplayer -ao alsa -channels 6 file/dvd

If anyone wants a copy of asound.state, just let me know here. It is 46k
plain and 2681 in .gz.

Would it be appropriate to post 46k here?