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- 24 Oct 2002
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Hi,
I've been using Ubuntu Intrepid as a media centre for a few weeks and am really pleased with it. I thought I'd share my experiences with you in case I can help anyone out.
I use VGA outputted to a HDTV and analogue 5.1 sound out via the 3 stereo outputs on my motherboard.
I watch a combination of DVD's, hidef MKV's and standard def AVI's.
I found that the standard video player (totem) was a bit choppy with hidef stuff and a bit thin on options. A bit of research tells me that Mplayer is the best quality and fastest player and has loads of options. I didn't much like the GUI so I settled on SMplayer which uses the Mplayer backend but is a bit more newbie-friendly.
SMplayer worked much better with the hidef stuff than totem and was easy to use so I stuck with it.
The big problem is that I could only get stereo sound. Ubuntu didn't seem to know about the rears, center, or the sub. After a search I find that Ubuntu's sound system is called Pulseaudio, but Pulseaudio only has 2 channels enabled by default. To enable all the channels I had to edit the file
~/.pulse/daemon.conf and create the line "default-sample-channels = 6".
After doing this I had 5.1 sound in the movies which had a 5.1 track - BUT on stereo files (including music) I had the stereo replicated across all 6 speakers which sounded rubbish. It seems that Pulseaudio will auto-upmix to all its speakers. To turn this off you need to add the line "disable-remixing=yes" to the daemon.conf. This left me with a setup which used the front 2 speakers for stereo output, but full 5.1 on the movies which had the full soundtrack.
Dolby Surround takes a regular stereo input and spits out 5.1. I know that many of my stereo movies are actually encoded with surround and hoped to be able to get this working. I found that there is a parameter called "surround" that can be passed to the audio filter in Mplayer which will decode the surround signal. Luckily there is a section in preferences section of SMplayer where you can set preferences and simply putting "surround" in the audio filter section makes this work.
So now I have 5.1 working for DVD's and MKV's that have it encoded in the usual formats, PLUS I have surround decoding working for my 2-channel files, PLUS stereo that does not have surround encoded only goes to the 2 front channels. This all sounds fantastic and was better than I ever managed in windows.
The video quality from Mplayer is flawless and I am very happy with it.
Hope some of this helps someone else.
I've been using Ubuntu Intrepid as a media centre for a few weeks and am really pleased with it. I thought I'd share my experiences with you in case I can help anyone out.
I use VGA outputted to a HDTV and analogue 5.1 sound out via the 3 stereo outputs on my motherboard.
I watch a combination of DVD's, hidef MKV's and standard def AVI's.
I found that the standard video player (totem) was a bit choppy with hidef stuff and a bit thin on options. A bit of research tells me that Mplayer is the best quality and fastest player and has loads of options. I didn't much like the GUI so I settled on SMplayer which uses the Mplayer backend but is a bit more newbie-friendly.
SMplayer worked much better with the hidef stuff than totem and was easy to use so I stuck with it.
The big problem is that I could only get stereo sound. Ubuntu didn't seem to know about the rears, center, or the sub. After a search I find that Ubuntu's sound system is called Pulseaudio, but Pulseaudio only has 2 channels enabled by default. To enable all the channels I had to edit the file
~/.pulse/daemon.conf and create the line "default-sample-channels = 6".
After doing this I had 5.1 sound in the movies which had a 5.1 track - BUT on stereo files (including music) I had the stereo replicated across all 6 speakers which sounded rubbish. It seems that Pulseaudio will auto-upmix to all its speakers. To turn this off you need to add the line "disable-remixing=yes" to the daemon.conf. This left me with a setup which used the front 2 speakers for stereo output, but full 5.1 on the movies which had the full soundtrack.
Dolby Surround takes a regular stereo input and spits out 5.1. I know that many of my stereo movies are actually encoded with surround and hoped to be able to get this working. I found that there is a parameter called "surround" that can be passed to the audio filter in Mplayer which will decode the surround signal. Luckily there is a section in preferences section of SMplayer where you can set preferences and simply putting "surround" in the audio filter section makes this work.
So now I have 5.1 working for DVD's and MKV's that have it encoded in the usual formats, PLUS I have surround decoding working for my 2-channel files, PLUS stereo that does not have surround encoded only goes to the 2 front channels. This all sounds fantastic and was better than I ever managed in windows.
The video quality from Mplayer is flawless and I am very happy with it.
Hope some of this helps someone else.
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