First, this is only partially MythTV related and probably more mplayer, but this may apply to others here as well.

I have ripped many of my DVD's into avi files for a "video on demand" system. I use MythVideo for browsing and watching them. I have always done this on my back/front-end master system. I recently decided I wanted the ability to watch these on any of the front-ends. Now the dilemma. Because I like good quality, I do audio passthrough of the 5.1 soundtracks from the DVD's. This is fine when doing digital audio out (see the wiki), but fails when using standard audio out of the nforce2 mobo. Movies with mp3 soundtrack work fine. This is to be expected.

Does the included mplayer have a method of realtime conversion of the digital soudtrack, or is there another way to mix down this on the fly. I probably should have thought of this all along and supplied two soundtracks, but I am nearly 150 movies into my collection, and starting over is just not practical. Neither really is adding a 5.1 tuner in the bedrooms. Any ideas... (note to those who ask how to rip these. I do not use myth's rip feature, I use another comp for this.)

if you look at that wiki article you'll notice the hwac3, and they make a stink about the comma cause it says use this first then try other things. If just having the comma there isn't working for you it is possible to specify another method to try next. for instance hwac3, ffmpeg (I think ffmpeg is one of them) at any rate having a good look at the mplay manpages will let you figure it out. "man mplayer". mplayer is capable of doing just about anything you could ever care to do with a video file.

_________________
Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

For others.. The key was this..
The main frontend with spdif audio out uses this at the end of the mplayer line for playing video files. (according to wiki)
-ao alsa:device=hw=0.2 -ac hwac3,

The key to getting the AC3 audio playing through the standard speaker jack on nforce2 hardware was this change
-ao alsa:device=hw=0.0

The device needs to be 0.0, and -ac hwac3, needs to be taken out.