Dolby Digital Airplay through Mountain Lion

[jasonc101]

I keep reading that airplay has the capability to play 5.1 using iTunes on apple forums. I was wondering if there is anyway to take advantage of mountain lions new airplay feature using vlc and transmitting the videos dolby digital or dts sound format.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

I doubt it can do passthrough for DD or AC3

[dsbenson]

AirPlay does AC3 passthru with Mavericks. You can see this in action with movie files. I'm not sure if this works with VLC, but it works with iTunes or apps like Beamer. With iTunes, the 5.1 audio needs to be a second audio channel, encoded as AC3. With Beamer, it can be a primary audio channel (and I believe can be in a 5.1 format other than AC3).

However, I can't find any app including VLC that can stream *audio* files with 5.1. I wish VLC did. It seems clear that AirPlay can handle this because it works with video files.

[fkuehne]

This part of the AirPlay API and protocols is private and was not reverse engineered yet.

AirPlay as exposed by the official SDK, just provides support for 2.0 PCM and no way to push raw AC3 or DTS samples.

[dsbenson]

Ah, thanks very much for the reply. I saw a mention that Beamer was able to support 5.1 over AirPlay because they reverse engineered the protocol, which is why they're not available in the Mac App store. Well, I'll hope that someone will either reverse engineer this into VLC (wish I had the skill!) or that Apple will put this into their SDK at some point.

Thanks again for your excellent work on VLC!