Imported Videos not playing 5.1 Audio

[mgleed]

I've been researching this forum but I haven't found a solution that works. I'm using a digital optical connection from my sound card to my 5.1 surround sound receiver. All other aspects of Sage audio work great. I get 5.1 Dolby from both recorded shows and DVD playback but playback of my imported videos is always just sterio. The video's are H.264 AVIs with AC3 5.1 audio tracks.

I've read on the forums that I may need to modify the sage.properties file in order to get mplayer to output 5.1. However, ever change I've made to the sage.properties files make absolutely no change to the output of imported videos. It's as if the config changes to the sage.properties file are having no effect at all on mplayer playback. When I make changes I kill my sage client and stop the sage service before making the changes.

Current modifications to sage.properties (note: this works great when I play my videos with mplayer directly outside of Sage):
extra_mplayer_args=-channels 6
mplayer/use_for_all_mpeg4_playback=true

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Additional system info:
OS: Vista Ultimate
Sage: 6.1.9

[paulbeers]

What codecs are you using? AC3Filter?

[mgleed]

I've installed the most recent version of AC3filter from their website. I've tried adding the line:

mplayer/use_for_all_mpeg4_playback=false

to the sage.properties file to get mplayer to use AC3filter but the behavior never changes and AC3filter isn't used. If I play the videos via windows media player then I can see that AC3filter is being used so AC3filter should be the priority audio codec.

[mgleed]

I've looked through this thread:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...&highlight=5.1

which seems very close to the issue I'm having but every modification to the sage.properties file suggested has absolutely no change in symptom. Anyone have any suggestions?

[mgleed]

I got the problem solved. I had to add the following lines:

extra_mplayer_args=-afm hwac3
mplayer/audio_renderer=win32

to my SageClient.properties file at path c:\Users\[me]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\SageTV\SageTV.

I was editing the Sage.properties file and a version in the application install directory vs. the user directory since I'm running Windows Vista.