totem-gstreamer does not support 5.1 surround sound

Did you configure VLC to use 5.1 sound (in the audio menu)?
Default is of course stereo...

I forgot because I'm not familiar with vlc, it gets quite interesting.
If Audio->Audio device is set to 5.1 after opening the file with vlc, both the Dolby and the Ogg test file produce output from all 6 speakers, but the sound is stuttering and vlc spews lots of the following error messages:
alsa error: write failed (Broken pipe)

Does totem-gstreamer play the surround wav in ftp://ling.lll.hawaii.edu/pub/greg/Surround-SDL-testfiles.tgz correctly for you?

No, under my test system described above totem-gstreamer produces just stereo output on Bjorn_Lynne-The_Fairy_Woods(5-1_surround).ogg, dolby-canyon.ogg, and dolby-city.ogg. The files chan-id.wav, dolby-enlighten.wav, and space_battle.wav could not be played as there appears to be no decoder plugin neither in base, bad, or ugly.

It is very odd that the .wavs would not play. I'm fairly sure that they are handled by good. Is your system up to date (a fix for multichannel wavs went in a month ago to dapper)? What version(s) of gstreamer are you running now?

The above results were still from the totem/gstreamer-versions listed in the original bug report.

I just updated to the following versions:

totem 1.4.1-0ubuntu2
totem-gstreamer 1.4.1-0ubuntu2
gstreamer0.10-alsa 0.10.7-0ubuntu3
gstreamer0.10-esd 0.10.3-0ubuntu4
gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs 0.10.7-0ubuntu3
gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad 0.10.3-0ubuntu3
gstreamer0.10-plugins-base 0.10.7-0ubuntu3
gstreamer0.10-plugins-base-apps 0.10.7-0ubuntu3
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good 0.10.3-0ubuntu4
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly 0.10.3-0ubuntu3
gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse 0.10.3-2
gstreamer0.10-tools 0.10.6-0ubuntu2
gstreamer0.10-x 0.10.7-0ubuntu3
libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 0.10.7-0ubuntu3
libgstreamer0.10-0 0.10.6-0ubuntu2

totem-gstreamer now also plays the wav, but just as the ogg files only in stereo.

Perhaps this can help. To get 5.1 playback for everything, I created an .asoundrc in my home dir with:
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "surround51"
slave.channels 6
route_policy duplicate
}

After that, everything will be in 5.1 , however GStreamer gave heavy ticking in the sound. Totem-xine, xine play fine now. (ticking sound was reported as a bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=365429 )

finalbeta:

Those files already have 5 channels in them - unlike stereo tracks there is already a channel for every speaker so channel duplication isn't really the right thing to do...

I can confirm this bug. Impossible to have 5.1 working with totem-gstreamer with current Feisty.

I've finally tested this on my old 4.1 sound card and I've come up against the same problems. First off I can confirm that I never hear anything out of the rear speakers using totem-gstreamer. Secondly I can't get gst-launch-0.10 to do the right thing with a multichannel wav (compared to the output produced by aplay). I shall spin this second issue off into a bug of its own so lets focus on the first issue here.

Description of the problem:
Totem-gstreamer doesn't output sound through the rear speakers despite the audio output being set to 4-channel/4.1-channel/5.0-channel/5.1-channel .

Steps to reproduce:
(assuming you have a working surround soundcard with 4 or more speakers correctly attached)
1. Disconnect your front speakers.
2. Run
speaker-test -Dsurround41 -c 4 -twav
Note that "Rear Right" "Rear Left" are announced through the rear right and rear left speakers respectively.
3. Download and extract
ftp://ling.lll.hawaii.edu/pub/greg/Surround-SDL-testfiles.tgz
4. Run
aplay -Dsurround41 Surround-SDL-testfiles/chan-id.wav
Note how "Rear Left" "Rear Right" are announced through the rear left and rear right speakers respectively.
5. Start totem .
6. Go to Edit -> Preferences. Select the Audio tab and change the Audio output type to 4.1-channel. Click close.
7. Go to Movie -> Open and select Surround-SDL-testfiles/chan-id.wav . Click add.

Expected results:
Audio file to start play. "Rear Left" "Rear Right" are announced through the rear left and rear right speakers respectively.

Actual results.
Audio file to starts playing. No sound is heard at all.

How reproducible is the problem?
The problem is reproducible every time.

Additional information:
Soundcard is a 4.1 Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 07)
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=Surround-SDL-testfiles/chan-id.wav ! wavparse ! audioconvert ! audio/x-raw-int, channels=6 ! alsasink device=surround41
produces sound but not the correct sound compared to aplay. It announces "Centre" from the rear left speaker and "Rear Left/Rear Right" simultaneously from the right hand speaker.

Version information:
Ubuntu Feisty
totem 2.18.1-0ubuntu3
totem-gstreamer 2.18.1-0ubuntu3
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good 0.10.5-1ubuntu2

Confirming.

Bug #105541 has been filed with regard to multichannel wavs being played out of the wrong speakers. Gstreamer itself seems able to play multichannel AC3 correctly though. Does anyone have a multichannel ogg vorbis file that announces speakers?

There is a upstream bug about 5.1 issues in totem.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=409661

Bug #323298 does not sound like a duplicate of this bug. The description clearly states the problem only occurs when visualisations are enabled...

As noticed by Sitsofe Wheeler, 5.1 surrond sound works great in totem except for audio only file when visualizations is used. Therefore I unmarked bug #323298 as a duplicate of this one (that now could be marked as fixed).

Marking as fixed (see my previous comment for the reason)

I just tested with visualizations disabled and I'm still seeing this bug. Are you sure it's fixed?

Info:
I'm on Ubuntu 9.04. I get successful surround from the command line with "mplayer -ao alsa -channels 6 testsurround.ogg". VLC can't figure out how to access the device "surround51", so reverts to stereo. And totem only plays stereo.

Yes it works. Try with this file : http://ftp.icm.edu.pl/packages/mplayer/samples/A-codecs/AC3-samples/Canyon-5.1-48khz-448kbit.ac3, play the file, toggle lateral panel on (F9), and look at "Audio" part : you'll get "Surround 5.1" canals.

Nope. When I use the VOB file in the bug description above, it says "Surround 5.1" but I can't hear enough to confirm whether it truly is or not. Other than that, all files I've tested, including the one you linked to, show up as "Stereo".

Perhaps you have a more recent version of Totem than I do? Mine says:

Totem Movie Player 2.26.1
... using GStreamer 0.10.22

> Nope. When I use the VOB file in the bug description above, it says
> "Surround 5.1" but I can't hear enough to confirm whether it truly is or
> not. Other than that, all files I've tested, including the one you
> linked to, show up as "Stereo".
>
I think your pulseaudio setup may be wrong. You need to change the
pulseaudio configuration to use more than 2 speakers. You can install
pavucontrol to monitor the output of each channel.

As launchpad is not a forum, you may answer me directly if you want more
precisions.
Others may add more comments later if they got the bug or may write that
it's fixed.
> Perhaps you have a more recent version of Totem than I do? Mine says:
>
> Totem Movie Player 2.26.1
> ... using GStreamer 0.10.22
I've got the same versions as you : the jaunty ones.

Thank you for posting this bug.

As per upstream this issue is Invalid and Launchpad notes Fixed Released.

Unlinking upstream bug, but if this issue resurfaces, please relink with Valid bug.

Marking this bug as Fixed Released.