Is there a player that can playback wma9 5.1 in w2k?

[kallekill]

I noticed that in order to get 5.1 audio from Windows Media 9 movies you have to use Windows XP. It seems to me that it shouldn't be that hard to enable it in Windows 2000 but Microsoft doesn't seem to do that. I was wondering if there is a media player that can playback .wmv files with 5.1 wma-audio in Windows 2000. Microsoft has released a few trailers on their site with HDTV 1280*720 resolution WMV movies with 5.1 sound. Soon Terminator 2 will be released in this format too and it would be nice to be able to play the 5.1 audio without installing XP.

[Blight]

Zoom Player v3 suppots the 5.1 interface, not sure if under 2K, only tested it under XP. But it won't cost you anything to try it out.

[kallekill]

I can't get it to work in Zoomplayer. I have both a .wav-file and a .wma file with 5.1 sound. The surround works fine on the .wav file but I don't get surround on the .wma file. I tried to check the "Enable Windows Media Audio Support" but it didn't help. The thing is that there is some build in check into the wma-codec. If any of these criteria are met the sound is downsampled to stereo. The criteria are:

* Media Player other than V9
* OS other than XP
* The system has a Stereo sound card
* Copying content to a portable device or to CD

It uses the speaker settings to determine if you got a 5.1 system and if you are using any other player than Windows Media Player 9, the codec does the downsampling instead of media player.

I got this answer when I asked why you have to have XP to get 5.1-sound:

"Rendering multi-channel WMA Professional requires support for the
waveformatextensible file headers, which is not (and not planned to be) supported on Win2K and below."

I don't know if there is an easy way around this.

[kallekill]

Seems as if there are other things absent from the Win 2000 version of Media Player 9:

"Windows XP users can select and play music in WMP9 by certain criteria, such as "high-bitrate music," "low-bitrate music" or "music I haven't heard." This feature was absent from the default installation on our Windows Me test machine; we had to manually copy the "Sample Playlists" folder (inside My Documents>My Music) from a machine running WMP9 under Windows XP to the same location on the computer running Windows Me to enable it, at which point it worked perfectly. Thus, it looks as though Microsoft has arbitrarily omitted it as an encouragement to upgrade to XP."

http://www.audiobuyersguide.com/software/audio/wmp9-techreport.html

[Blight]

Ok, I think you're screwed then.

Well, I got ZP to play 5.1 under XP, so the WMP9 thing is BS.

But... that "waveformatextensible" is for real. The the header that describes the audio stream. It's quite possible that the undelaying MS code to process it only exists under XP, you also need a sound driver capable of supporting this header, which may also be limited to XP... so, maybe, but doubtful.

[gabest]

Under win98 only the waveout renderer filter can output waveformatextensible with any channel number. There must be another reason, maybe the 24 bit/sample requirement.