[Mike Rivers]

Is there such a thing? Surely there must be, with all the games with
surround audio, and all the consumer grade sound cards with multichannel
outputs. But what applications play this stuff?

The reason why I'm asking is because I'm trying to find a good answer
for someone on the Mackie forum who wants to know how he can get stuff
coming out of the rear speakers that he has connected to his Satellite
Firewire audio interface. It has six outputs, and they all show up and
work in a real DAW application. I've confirmed that with my Satellite.
But I don't know what I might have, for example, as a DVD player, that
would take advantage of outputs 3-6. In the Windows Sound control panel,
there's a "Speakers" menu that lets me select 5.1 surround and I did
that. I stuck in Ethan Winer's Tele-Vision CD, selected the cello
extravaganza, selected 5.1 surround, and I still get no outputs beyond
channels 1-2.

I'm using Media Player Classic, which uses the VLC MPEG-2 codec. Maybe
that's not capable of giving me surround sound. I just don't know
anything about these things. I tried using Media Player 9, but that
tells me that it doesn't have the proper codec to play a DVD. Obviously
I have a suitable codec, but Media Player (and Microsoft's decoder
checker) can't seem to find it. No big deal. I don't care if that's a
Microsoft quirk. I'll let that pass (and please, you do, too).

I'm not going to go out and buy something to do this - heck I don't even
have surround speakers anywhere. But if the answer is "you need to buy a
real DVD player application" then that's what I'll tell this guy. But
what do all the game players use?



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