AAC over S/PDIF in OS X.

[kakomu]

I started playing with multi-channel audio in some of the most recent video encodes I've made by encoding whichever DTS or AC3 track that came with the movie into a 5.1 channel AAC file.

These audio files are muxed in an MKV container with h.264 video and play just fine in Media Player Classic with FFDShow installed. In "Output", I've checked "AC3 (S/PDIF encode mode)" with "Encode 5.1 Streams Only".

However, in OS X, the computer connected to my TV and stereo in the living room, I'm having a difficult time finding information on getting AAC 5.1 audio to my receiver. It appears that VLC player doesn't support AAC over S/PDIF (though AC3 works fine). I'm also not finding much information otherwise about video players for OS X that may be able to support AAC over S/PDIF.

Anyone have any recommendations?

[golagoda]

Another player available for Mac is mplayer2, the latest build of it I could find is located here - http://code.google.com/p/mplayerosx-builds/downloads/list

To use AC3/DTS over s/pdif just use the command line flag '-afm hwac3'

[kakomu]

VLC already sends AC3/DTS over S/PDIF for OS X. I'm looking for a means to encode 5.1 AAC to AC3 on-the-fly like FFDshow's audio decoder can do.

As an aside, a little over posting the OP, I found that XBMC can do AC3 encoding of AAC audio data over S/PDIF.

[golagoda]

VLC already sends AC3/DTS over S/PDIF for OS X. I'm looking for a means to encode 5.1 AAC to AC3 on-the-fly like FFDshow's audio decoder can do.

As an aside, a little over posting the OP, I found that XBMC can do AC3 encoding of AAC audio data over S/PDIF.

Ah that's great to hear, I was going to recommend XBMC since it's the goto program for linux HTPC's but I've never actually used it myself so I didn't