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Surround sound question
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No, six-channel discrete is a completely different technology than DPLII (matrix). The ATV does not have the six outputs, so even if your receiver has them it won't do any good. Best you can do for now is to encode in DPLII using Handbrake.
By the way, if it is encoded in AAC and the ATV could decode it, it wouldn't matter to the receiver since the six outputs on the ATV would be line level. Thus, you could get all channels to play back. Unfortunately, it'll take a hardware revision for that to show up. I'm hoping for a software solution next month (DD and/or DTS passthrough in Quicktime component). And of course the media to go with it.
Even more egregious is not giving a simple passthrough on the SPDIF digital output. Why they make it downmix to 2 channel PCM is completely beyond me. That alone has stopped at least 5 people I know from buying an Apple TV.
And it's held me off from buying one too. If this changes after Macworld I'm buying a new ATV the moment it's available. Until then, I'll use my Xbox 360 to stream media from my iMac.
I'm not sure why, either. It's already in DVD Player app and VLC can do it, so why has Apple left it out of Quicktime? Hopefully, we'll have an update at MWSF to rectify this.
Quicktime can do it with Perian, I never tried it without having Perian installed. Its one of the first things I install, guess this just adds 1 more thing to add to default quicktime's list of weaknesses.
The problem is you cannot put DD or DTS audio inside an ATV Quicktime-compatible file. You can do it with MKV files (AC-3 passthrough), but they do not play on the ATV. On a Mac, VLC will play MKV files (e.g., H.264 and AC-3 DD) and passthrough the 5.1 surround file out the optical port. All we want from Quicktime is to do the same.