Audio Surround 5.1 with VLC over AirPlay

[dsbenson]

I have used Adobe Audition and other tools to create multiple 5.1-encoded *audio* files in formats that support 5.1 such as FLAC, WMV, MP3 and AIFF. I'm trying to stream these with VLC 2.1.2 for Mac over AirPlay to my 5.1-capable stereo.

I have verified that my system does support 5.1 over AirPlay by playing .MOV and .AVI files that contain 5.1 audio. I can verify this with iTunes and Beamer.

However, regardless of the VLC options (S/PDIF, Dolby Surround), I cannot get 5.1 *audio files* OR *video files* to stream over AirPlay in 5.1.
To verify this, I compared the actions and audio of Beamer vs VLC:

.avi with 5.1 audio
.wmv with 5.1 audio
.flac with 5.1 audio

Beamer: .AVI switches my stereo to Dolby Digital decoding, and plays 5.1
[Beamer won't play .wmv or .flac]

VLC: same .avi file disables Dolby Digital decoding, and plays in stereo.
This is over AirPlay to Apple TV 2, which has the Dolby Surround setting turned on.

Q: can VLC be made to stream surround sound over AirPlay with movie files?
Q: with Audio-only files? [WMV, FLAC, ALAC, MP3, AIFF, etc.]

[dsbenson]

Update: Felix Paul Kuehne posted a response to this same question as part of another thread on Wed Feb 12, 2014:

"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."

[arrafz]

So how does Beamer http://beamer-app.com do that?