forcing stereo output?

Hi everyone,

Sorry to bug you all on the devel list, I know this isn't really the
right place, but I have had a look around and haven't been able to solve
my problem. I'm hoping somebody here might be able to help me or at
least point me in the right direction.

What I'm looking to do is to force xine to downmix audio to stereo
regardless of what kind of sound device it detects and how many channels
are in the video it's playing.

The issue I'm having is that I have a soundblaster live 5.1 card which
supports surround, but I only use it for stereo. xine seems to be
sending audio from 5.1 channel videos to the card as 5.1 channels, and
my sound card is dutifully outputting this as 5.1. But because surround
uses a different plug/wiring setup to stereo I'm only getting the right
channel most of the time when I play 5.1 videos.

I would have expected the setting: setup -> audio ->
output.speaker_arrangement to control whether xine does downmixing etc?
I have it set to "stereo 2.0", but when I play back a 5.1 video it plays
back through the device configured in the device.alsa_surround51_device
setting. As far as I can tell output.speaker_arrangement doesn't seem to
make any difference, it all seems to depend on how many audio channels
the video has? Am I missing something?

Any tips anybody can give would be much appreciated. I feel like I've
dealt with this before but I'm drawing a blank trying to figure it out
myself. Any tips, however small, would be muchly appreciated :)

Thanks!

-Dale