i’ve tried to use the a52 on the fly ac3 encoder alsa plugin.

But currently i got only choppy or noisy output from mplayer (choppy) and vlc (noisy, a lot of crackles).

I’ve used the following .asoundrc :

pcm.ac3enc {

type a52
bitrate 448
channels 6

}

for mplayer (-ao alsa:device=ac3enc -channels 6)

and

pcm.!surround51 {

type a52
card 0
channels 6
bitrate 384

}

for vlc (no special setup, only load a 6 channel file, for example some apple.com/trailers).