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).