Force downmix to stereo from 5.1

[drpixel]

I apologize in advance if this has been asked elsewhere. I did a search of the forums and didn't see this asked yet, so here goes..

I have a ton of movies that I've created using Nero 7, and most if not all of them were encoded to store the Dolby 5.1 audio track. While this works great on my living room computer which has 5.1, it doesn't work so good in our bedroom where we only have stereo sound. I can barely hear the audio with the volume cranked all the way up. I'm guessing the reason it is so faint is that it's trying to playback the movie in 5.1, but there is no center channel.

Does Sage automatically downmix the 5.1 audio track to 2 channel? If it doesn't, is there a way to set it to do force this?

If it does downmix, then my problem is probably related to recording level. Is there a way to tell it to normalize the volume (mplayer does this with a cmd line switch) or just set the audio gain higher during playback?

[GbrNole]

is this an mvp or a client pc we're talking about?

mvp downmixes 5.1 audio but a client pc will do it through codec setting.

[drpixel]

Originally Posted by GbrNole

is this an mvp or a client pc we're talking about?

mvp downmixes 5.1 audio but a client pc will do it through codec setting.

It's on a client PC. I just found the solution and came back online to post it. It looks like you can add mplayer compatible switches the extra_mplayer_args property in sage.properties. Here are the ones I used:

-channels 2 -af volnorm

This will activate automatic volume normalization (takes a few seconds to kick in) and enfoce the downmix to stereo.

I stream most of my movies off of my network, and have also found the following switches help somewhat:

-framedrop -cache 4192

Cheers!