The VideoLAN Forums

As mentioned in the forum topic about VLC not supporting... (https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=125032) it looks like AC3 and even eAC3 support is now natively available in iOS and tvOS.
As I get complaints, that my app based on VLCKit on tvOS is not supporting Dolby 5.1 audio inside transport streams (streamed from sattelite tv receivers), while other apps do so, I would like to know:
- can i tell VLCKit to pass through the audio substream to CoreAudio?
- do I need a newer version of VLCKit to automatically have it supported (afaik latest VLCKit version is from May 10th)?

Any support is welcome, as I am about to release vesion 1.1 soon (already in beta). and I would like to have a solution there...

Thx in advance SSB

Ah, I just checked today for new version of VLCKit and - sorry - I missed some updates. Maybe I haven't seen the commits in the mailing list.
I am now building a new VLCKit from scratch and - I hope it works - will check the result.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

ah, looks, like this patch is already available since a while.
But testers report, that they always get the stereo mix-down instead of AC-3/Dolby 5.1.

Would enabling the "toSPDIF" option for the mediaplayer instance solve the issue?
If yes, i would extend VLCKit to expose this option to VLCKit, so I can enable this option from my app.
Any hints welcome...

OK, I tried a bit - and well: it looks like creating a player instance with custom options (adding --spdif) solves the issues.
So, problem solved.
I would just like to get the default setting for the current platform, would be much easier than collecting them from the VLCKit sources.

OK... me again... not sure if anyone else is actually reading this...

Well, using --spdif option makes sure, that the audio-stream is natively routed to the HDMI-Audio channel of the AppleTV. I assume it simply uses a device drIver socket for audio output.
Works fine but has some strange side effects:
- audio may be out of sync (ahead of image)
- tvOS does not know about this. Eg the focus engine sounds reach the speakers with really "interesting" distortions.

So, it looks like it is not really compatible - more a hackers detour.
So - does anyone has advice how to configure VLCKit to make multi-channel audio work??