> > Thesr contain 5.1 audio. Playing it on my stereo gear
> > (I only have two ears anyway), I would expect the players
> > (mplayer, ffplay, mpv, vlc) to do the reasonable thing:
> > figure out the "right" position in the stereo panorama
> > and play it "there".
> > 
> > But it seems only mplayer does that - for example,
> > all the other players play the "center" channel on the left.
> > 
> > If anyone cares about this, can you plese confirm/report what
> > the various players do with this on your stereo hardware?
> 
> In short, for ffmpeg, passing `-ac 2` will force it to mix down to
> stereo.

For the record: 'ffplay -ac 2' does not work:
it plays a 5.1 movie silently and slowly.

The fplay(1) manpage doesn't even mention -ac,
but ffplay apparently accepts it, as an ffmpeg option.

> My testing with mpv showed that using the `--audio-channels=stereo`
> configuration option correctly mixes down to stereo with dialog
> correctly mixed across both left & right channels. 

That works, thanks.

> $ ffplay -af "aformat=channel_layouts=stereo" ...

That also works, thanks.


	Jan