problem with xbmc - only background sound with AC3 5.1 movies

[chikko]

hey guys.
i'm using xbmc under kubuntu (feisty fawn) and discovered that when i play a movie that has an AC3/5,1 support i can only hear the background sounds (i'm using an HP pavilion laptop that has a standard soundcard and my stereo receives it's signal from the laptop's earphone jack).
when i try and press "m" to go into the options menu while playing a movie i can see that under the sound options there is only "unknown AC3 5.1 (1/1) " and i cannot change that..
as i understand, the xbmc runs the movies using mplayer's engine (i might be wrong here) - but when i try and run the exact same movie without xbmc, using mplayer, the sound seem to work fine and i can hear everything - not just the background..

any way out of this? (i don't want to quit xbmc every time i need to run a movie that supports 5.1.. )

thanks!

[snappz]

in the readme. downmixing.

[Rand Al Thor]

had a similar problem until i found the sample .asoundrc in the build folder

[chikko]

hey guys - thanks for replying so quickly!
i read the downmixing part in the readme file and copied & renamed the demo file into my home directory.
i still have a problem though: (newbie...)
the .asoundrc file has the volume parameters for each and every speaker, so i could just set all the speakers to 1.0 - but then i'd still hear the background alone when i try and run a 5.1 movie. alternatively, i could make only the left & right speakers loud, and set all the others to 0.0 - but then i'd hear nothing at all while playing this kind of movies..
is there a way of configuring the .asoundrc file so that all the sound channels would be mashed into the left and right speakers?.. (downmixing...)

thanks again!