[MPlayer-users] no main audio channel

[Corey Hickey]

E. Hakan Duran wrote:
> I have been using mplayer quite a while. Recently I noticed a rather weird 
> change in its behavior. When I try to view the movies encoded with AC3, I can 
> not hear the main audio channel which contains the dialogs, etc. I can hear 
> the background effects such as birds chipping, planes taking-off, etc. So 
> people are talking on the screen but all you can hear is the background 
> sounds, not the main audio channel. I can hear everything when I view the 
> same file with kmplayer. I tried to locate a config file thinking that it 
> might be accidentally modified; the ~/.mplayer/config file was the file that 
> I created a while ago and I don't think it contained anything to cause this 
> problem. I tried to tweak the mplayer-gui settings, such as changing the 
> audio server to oss, arts, etc. instead of alsa, which I have been using 
> without problem before, without any success. I also played with audio codec 
> settings and tried various different options there, again with no success.

That sounds to me like you're hearing a multi-channel audio track on two 
speakers without any downmixing. I suspect somewhere in your config file 
is a line that says "channels=6" (or similar). Remove it.

If that doesn't help, then post the config file and the full text output 
of mplayer when you play a problematic file.

-Corey