Why is it that when I watch (in KMPlayer for the sake of discussion, but it doesn't get any better on most other players I've tried either) a dvdrip movie (ac3, x264) the sound of people's voices is very faint, but the background sound is very loud.
This is relatively new ... since in the "old days" the movies played ok. So it must be something with the encoding, or with the used player ?
I'm playing it on windows xp on a cheap (i guess) laptop sound card. Nothing special.
Check the audio settings: I battles this for ages until I saw that 5.1 surround sound was enabled. See if you can change this to normal 2 speaker stereo.
If you're using an external codec pack, you can try to reinstall it. If you're just using KMP's internal codecs, I recommend you to uninstall KMP with Revo Uninstaller because of this reason, then install CCCP codec pack together with a good player. I've used KMPlayer for a long time as well till it started to malfunction, but now I'm using GOM Player and CCCP duo. Hope this helps.
This may be a bit of a stretch, but is your speaker connection plugged in fully?
If a 3.5mm TRS connector is not completely plugged in, you can accidentally wind up with the connector bridging the two audio channels, so sounds which are in the center (e.g. equally presented on each channel) seem very muted, while sounds that are exclusively on one channel come through at full volume.
It seems possible considering it has worked in the past, and the fact that this is a laptop may mean the connector is moved about a lot.
