HOw to reduce surround sound in DIVX playback?

[puppykitten]

I got a rather old onboard sound chip. When I play DIVX with MediaPlayer, the surround is so large that I can't hear the talk clearly. (I have a 3-piece speaker system). Is this because of the compression of 5.1 channel to 2 channels? I am planning to buy a new 5.1 channel , 6-output sound card, such as the one below, still use my 3-piece speaker system(plug into the front left and right jack). Will this solve the problem? Thanks a lot! (the card)

 

[dingdongdingdong]

look at speaker icon on the right hand side bottom. right click choose opnen volume control than disable 3d sound or disable surrsound. I hope this will help you out

 

[Quickfingerz]

it could be the encoder's fault... the encoder should be using dynamic compression on the AC3 file... when they don't you get low volumed speech and loud effects. there is a program called powerdivx player that will do a dynamic compression on playback.

 

[Jeff7]

when they don't you get low volumed speech and loud effect[/b]
<rant>
The source DVD is the problem there. Every DVD I've had has that problem. You turn up the sound so you can hear the talking, but then the speakers blow themselves to pieces when there's some sound effect. I just finally gave up, and turned it down to an acceptable level, and rely on the captions so I can tell what anyone is saying. For me, it's VHS all the way until DVD's have a sane and more constant sound level.
</rant>

For your problem, some DVD encoders have a normalize function that can be applied to the sound, which should be able to make it easier to listen to. I've used some that do that; unfortunately, they are either incredibly buggy and cause system crashes, or else they separate the sound and video into 2 files that are different lengths, so they can't be merged.