ffdshow Bypassing Xonar’s Control Panel and Settings

I recently bought an Asus Xonar DX as I was getting fed up of the interference on my onboard sound card. However, as I use headphones I often need to use the soundcard’s functions to boost the bass a bit if I want to hear it. While most applications would go via the Xonar control panel and boost the bass, ffdshow would bypass it and not boost the bass. Hence, any movies I played where distinctly lacking bass.

To solve this, simply set Audio Channel to something other than “2 Channels” on the main section of the control panel. Don’t worry, the Xonar card automatically handles downmixing back to 2 channels (or whatever your Analogue Out is set as) for the actual output. This is simply the interface it presents to programs such as ffdshow. Now, ffdshow should go via the Xonar control panel and apply all the effects you’ve set, such as bass boosting.