How to get 5.1 audio in Google Chrome?

Question

I'm using Windows 7 and my speaker configuration is surround (5.1). I don't have any problem with games or my MP3 player. Games have surround output and it works perfect. MP3 player's output is stereo and my sound driver (creative) fills up the stereo to surround so it's perfect too. My only problem is with Chrome + YouTube + Html player. I can't hear the music from the rear speakers on Chrome.

I tried many things including chrome.exe --disable-audio-output-resampler switch for Chrome but nothing helped. Chrome's output is surround unlike my MP3 player. So the Creative sound driver can't fill it up to surround because it's already surround. YouTube videos don't have surround channels. They only have stereo channel. In this case, Chrome plays the video sound on first 2 channels. The other channels (3.1) are empty. Creative can't fill up the first 2 channels to 5.1 because it doesn't work on applications with surround output. It only works on stereo output.

So I've come up with an idea. If I can fool the Chrome to think that my speaker configuration is stereo (even if it's 5.1 physically), it would set it's output as stereo so my Creative driver could work on Chrome to fill its output to surround.

Does anybody know if I can fool a specific application (Chrome in this case) to believe I have stereo speaker configuration?

Answer 1

Update: As of Jan 13 - 2020 this option appears to be GONE and appears to be active by default (version: 79.0.3945.117)
So nothing needs to be done. You can verify with a true 5.1 audio file played through the browser. https://youtu.be/XdfmAkasBcc [A test video that works for me]

Go to chrome://flags and enable #try-supported-channel-layouts flag; relaunch.

chrome://flags/#try-supported-channel-layouts

This way it worked. Chrome::Youtube surround sound on my 5.1 speakers finally!

I could not get it working via the command line options. And perhaps the other command line options are now deprecated. Generally too, I recommend using the flags instead of the command line params.

Answer 2

Ive been looking for the same answer and finally found it so I thought I have to share it with you(and others with the same problem). The solution for me was to put " --force-wave-audio" at the end of the shortcut. I hope it helps others too!

Answer 3

The chosen answer (try-supported-channel-layouts flag) definitelly works for youtube videos, however, there appears to be an issue with similar symptoms on videos with stereo sound that prevents some videos from working on 5.1 setups on win 10 (9gag is full of those kinds of videos at the moment). I figured a slightly off-topic answer might be appropriate here, because it is technically a 5.1 speaker issue and I landed on this question on when looking for a solution.

So what you can try is chrome extensions. There are multiple sound booster/3d (and similar) extensions available for chrome. The idea is to have chrome direct the audio to them and they play it on their own. I'm using Aria-3D, because you can either keep on all the time or switch it off, and whenever you don't hear sound, click its icon, it remains off, but it takes control of the sound (as in unaltered sound plays through correct channels, or so I hope).

The downsides of these tools:

• Whenever a tab uses that extension you'll get a blue rectangle on the tab, indicating that "This tab's content is being shared" (according to devs that's because sound is being directed into extension).
• The ones I tried don't actually support 5.1 audio ( they essentially convert to stereo )