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Diffstat (limited to 'DOCS/man/ao.rst')
| -rw-r--r-- | DOCS/man/ao.rst | 30 |
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diff --git a/DOCS/man/ao.rst b/DOCS/man/ao.rst index 258548b514..8c1966dcc4 100644 --- a/DOCS/man/ao.rst +++ b/DOCS/man/ao.rst @@ -68,6 +68,36 @@ Available audio output drivers are: shells (like zsh), you have to quote the option string to prevent the shell from interpreting the brackets instead of passing them to mpv. + Actually, you should use the ``--audio-device`` option, instead of + setting the device directly. + + .. warning:: + + Handling of multichannel/surround audio changed in mpv 0.8.0 from the + behavior in MPlayer/mplayer2 and older versions of mpv. + + The old behavior is that the player always downmixed to stereo by + default. The ``--audio-channels`` (or ``--channels`` before that) option + had to be set to get multichannel audio. Then playing stereo would + use the ``default`` device (which typically allows multiple programs + to play audio at the same time via dmix), while playing anything with + more channels would open one of the hardware devices, e.g. via the + ``surround51`` alias (typically with exclusive access). Whether the + player would use exclusive access or not would depend on the file + being played. + + The new behavior since mpv 0.8.0 always enables multichannel audio, + i.e. ``--audio-channels=auto`` is the default. However, since ALSA + provides no good way to play multichannel audio in a non-exclusive + way (without blocking other applications from using audio), the player + is restricted to the capabilities of the ``default`` device by default, + which means it supports only stereo and mono. But if a hardware device + is selected, then multichannel audio will typically work. + + The short story is: if you want multichannel audio with ALSA, use + ``--audio-device`` to select the device (use ``--audio-device=help`` + to get a list of all devices and their mpv name). + ``oss`` OSS audio output driver |