mkv in Media Player Classic: No English audio

[mysticgohan17]

Man it's been a while since I've asked for help on something.

I have a matroska (.mkv) video with two audio streams and subtitles, one English, one Japanese. I know for sure the English audio is there because firstly, I get this error:

Stream 1

Media Type 0:
--------------------------
AM_MEDIA_TYPE:
majortype: MEDIATYPE_Audio {73647561-0000-0010-8000-00AA00389B71}
subtype: Unknown GUID Name {000000FF-0000-0010-8000-00AA00389B71}
formattype: FORMAT_WaveFormatEx {05589F81-C356-11CE-BF01-00AA0055595A}
bFixedSizeSamples: 1
bTemporalCompression: 0
lSampleSize: 1
cbFormat: 23

WAVEFORMATEX:
wFormatTag: 0x00ff
nChannels: 6
nSamplesPerSec: 48000
nAvgBytesPerSec: 0
nBlockAlign: 0
wBitsPerSample: 0
cbSize: 5 (extra bytes)

and secondly I played the file in VLC Media Player and I can hear the English audio, but it wont mix the channels down to match my stereo. So I get 2 channels of hollowed out dialog, though the sound effects all sound great. (I assume it's 5.1, but nothing like VirtualDub or VirtualDubMod will open it so I can check, neither does Gspot). My only assumptions on solving this problem are to find out why the english audio isn't being found by Media Player Classic, make VLC downmix to stereo (my least favorite as I prefer MPC over VLC) or simply re-pack the .mkv to one that works or to .ogm or to a regular XviD .avi. Can anyone help?

[mysticgohan17]

After some research, I've discovered the audio is AAC/MPEG4/LC/SBR and sucessfully extracted it with mkvextract GUA. I've tried using dbPoweramp to decode it and it failed after a few seconds. I've converted it to .wav with Winamp's file write plugin, but it's not downmixed stereo, I still cant hear a damn thing. I installed an AAC parser and an AAC filter and Media Player Classic just crashes after opening. What should I try next?

[celtic_druid]

Media Player Classic has a built in aac decoder. I even updated it in a couple of builds to support PS decoding. It has always worked fine here and no parser is required if it is in an mkv/mka container.

[ChristianHJW]

Why dont you install CoreAAC from http://corecodec.org/projects/coreaac to get a nice DShow AAC decoder filter ? It even comes with a built in channel downmixer, to downmix 5.1 to 2.0 on Stereo only systems. BTW, uts shiiped by default wiht our 'evil' matroska full playback pack from http://packs.matroska.org

Christian
matroska project admin
http://www.matroska.org