[Titanium Man]

I have a video file in DivX 5 format with A52 (Dolby AC3) sound. It plays fine on my laptop but has no sound on my G5. I've double checked everything on the G5 and it has even more Quicktime components than the laptop, including 3ivx and Xvid. The only difference between the two machines is that the G5 is running 10.3.6 and Quicktime 6.5.2 while the Powerbook is running 10.3.4 and QT 6.5. Could that be the problem? Then again, I think the problem predated my updating the G5 and may even have happened with my previous PM G4. If I can't find out what the problem is, the Powerbook will be stuck at 10.3.4 because I don't want to risk having both machines unable to play these files.

Any suggestions?

[joe]

I ran into the same problem recently. A friend with a dual 2.5Ghz G5 Tower couldn't get VLC to play the audio on some HDTV (1080i) movie trailers. Other files played back through VLC just fine on his machine. But any time he tried to play an HDTV file VLC would give an error about not being able to start the Core Audio buffer (or similar).

However, my 1.8GHz G5 iMac had no trouble playing the same files with VLC. And going by the specs on Apple's site I assumed the G5 iMac had a similar type of audio (combo analog / digital outputs). Both machines have the latest OSX updates (10.3.6). He tried trashing the VLC prefs, upgrade to VLC 0.81, downgrading to VLC 0.72, etc. But nothing worked. FWIW, I tried VLC 0.81 on my machine but dropped back down to VLC 0.72. VLC 0.81 is a cpu hog and drops way too many frames to be useful on my 1.8GHz G5 iMac. Hopefully VLC 0.82 will correct this. But until then I'll be running VLC 0.71.

Good luck. Please post if you find out what's causing this problem.

[Apfhex]

With VLC 0.8.1, OS X 10.3.6, and QT 6.5.2 on my PowerBook I can play files with AC3 audio. QuickTime itself can't play AC3 audio, though.

Those PowerMac G5's have digital audio out, maybe it's trying to pump the audio through that instead of the mini-jack port? Doesn't make any sense why it'd do that though.

[Titanium Man]

I've thought about the audio out. Sounds strange, but I've seen Macs do stranger things. Unfortunately, I don't have anything with digital audio in so I can check the G5's output.

[f1000]

Try this codec:

http://www.insaneness.com/ac3.html

[Titanium Man]

Thanks. That did give me the ability to play it in QT Player and in the Finder preview, which is useful. It still won't play in VLC, which is understandable since VLC has its own codecs and doesn't use QT components.

I did notice that VLC changed to the A52 digital output when I started playing the movie. Changing it to the PCM stereo output produced badly garbled sound. I'm now convinced it must be some kind of bug with VLC trying to force AC3 audio through the digital out.

[Spoffo]

I have a similar problem with an added observation. Maybe someone from the VLC team is monitoring this and can help.

I had VLC running just fine on my old G4 under 10.3.6. I just upgraded to a 1.8mhz dual processor G5 also with 10.3.6, and suddenly no sound with VLC.

Here's the observation: When VLC starts to play a disc or file, it appears that it resets the system preference "Sound" panel to digital audio out. When I quit VLC after trying to play, I often find the all the sound on the computer is dead. I check the control panel, and sure enough it has been changed to digital out. I have to re-set it to "built-in audio" out to get the sound back.

If I then launch VLC, it switches the panel back to digital again.

Also, when VLC is running, the "Audio/audio device" is set for "O. Built-in audio digital" and if you try to change it to "1: Built-in stereo/PCM" the program crashes.

Any ideas?

[york28]

Thereis a known issue with G5's and VLC that causes audio to not work.

This tip fixed it for me:

Launch VLC/open Preferences/under the Audio subsection select "CoreAudio output" as Audio output module/click "Use the S/PDIF audio output when available"/Expand the "Modules" subsection/expand the "audio output"/click on "coreaudio"/change the "0" to "1" as the Audio Device/hit the save button/quit VLC/launch VLC

[Spoffo]

Perfect!

All is now well. This group is amazing.