Playing a movie with 5.1 audio and wearing Airpods Max headphones

[MickM]

I have a big movie library, that I have ripped from dvds I've purchased over the years, on a NAS box connected to a Mac mini whose display is my TV set and the audio goes through my AV receiver. I watch a movie by playing it via VLC and the movie's 5.1 audio (AC3 track) goes to my 5.1 speaker setup - so far so good. I want to use Apple's AirPods Max headphones (which have spacial audio capability) to mimic the 5.1 audio experience so I can watch a movie without disturbing anybody else or having them disturb me. I would have expected macOS to be able to ship the 5.1 audio to the headphones, but I'm suspicious VLC has to take on that burden. Is that right? I'd like to know if it's currently possible to achieve what I want using VLC before purchasing the headphones.

[fkuehne]

Regrettably, Apple does not support spatial audio on macOS so far. This is a feature for iOS and tvOS only which we are going to support in VLC with the next update. For macOS, we will do it as soon as Apple offers this option.

[MickM]

So here's where I possibly display a little ignorance. I thought the spacial audio was all about being able to move your head around while keeping the perceived positional source of the audio fixed. Given that I'll just be sitting on the couch watching a 5.1 movie, I don't need that aspect - my head will always be pointed at the TV. All I need is the actual 5.1 audio to appear like it's coming from my Airpods Max. I thought that reduced capability only required Dolby Digital or Dolby Atmos. According to this website:
https://professionalsupport.dolby.com/s ... uage=en_US
macOS does already support that.

I thought the Airpods Max would/should have supported those subset audio formats already, and if macOS also supports them then VLC would also have the hooks to use them.

[MickM]

Looks like I'll have to buy AirPods Max headphones myself to figure this out. Oh well.