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Topic: Playing Dolby Digital Plus (aka E-AC3) Audio (Read 6219 times) previous topic - next topic
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Playing Dolby Digital Plus (aka E-AC3) Audio

Hello to everyone, I hope someone out there can put me out of my misery.

For a few days now I've been hunting around trying to find a way to play E-AC3 audio. From what I can tell, I have three codecs installed that should be able to play it:
* libavcodec
* dtsac3source
* built in codec of Nero 7 Showtime 3.10.1.0 with the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD Video plugin

The utility eac3to can successfully decode E-AC3 audio using the Showtime decoder, and encode it as anything I like, FLAC, WAV, AC3, DTS, whatever. But I would just like to be able to play the actual E-AC3 audio with transcoding it losslessly to FLAC (which would result in huge file sizes) or lossily to AC3 or DTS (which would reduce the quality of the audio).

Nero Showtime (which can natively play E-AC3) does not seem to like playing my MKV files with x264 encoded video in. All other players can handle the video, but as soon as I mux in the E-AC3 audio and try to play them, they just don't play. It's as if I opened the file and immediately paused it.

I have the Combined Community Codec Pack 2008-9-21 installed which uses FFDshow, and I think it's confusing E-AC3 audio for standard AC3, and obviously failing. There is no setting on the audio configuration page to select a filter for E-AC3 audio, and the only options I can select for AC3 are liba52, disabled and S/PDIF.

So basically, my question after all this is, how I can play E-AC3 audio without transcoding it to another format (either beforehand or on-the-fly)?