You could get a stereo .wav using something like
mplayer -noconsolecontrols -novideo -really-quiet -vc null -vo null -ao
pcm:file=stereo_filename.wav downloaded.mkv
You do not need all the flags above, but it should work.
HTH, Willem
On Mon, 16 Oct 2017, Linux for blind general discussion
Since the first two channels of a 5.1 audio stream are front-left
and front-right[1] all you need is to extract those channels.
Ffmpeg can do this. Here's what I concoct (untested) based
on some web advice.[2]
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -vn -c:a copy -ac 2 stereo.flac
-vn means don't take the video,
I recently downloaded a .mkv file with 5.1 audio encoded to flac and
as I inteneded to listen to it on my Blaze ET, which doesn't support
mkv files, I used mkvextract to extract the audio, producing a 1.1GB
file with roughly a 90 minute runtime. Unfortunately, My Blaze ET
apparently can't handle
