I ripped The Lord of the Rings Trilogy recently and decided I wanted to use flac for the audio. On my computer I'm set up through a S/PDIF with the single co-axle cable going to my surround sound. When I encode audio with AC3 and 640 kb/s I get audio played through all 6 channels. However, when playing a movie with an audio encoded with flac, I'm only getting audio out of the left/right and LFE.

I have Classic Media Player set up with the FFDshow audio filter.

I've screwed around with settings within ffdshow, but have been unsuccessful. Mostly because I really have no idea what I'm doing. I have the mixer set up to handle 3/0/2 - 5 Channels with LFE checked. Under output I have all the boxes checked for Pass-through (S/PDIF, HDMI).

My main guess is that my receiver doesn't decode a flac encoded audio file properly or something. The only way I can hear it from all channels is if I check the box for AC3 (S/PDIF encode mode) which I think basically encodes the audio on the fly to AC3 and whatever bitrate I give it (not ideal as I want the lossless audio).

Is there a setting perhaps that I'm just completely missing? Or perhaps a different decoder I need installed (currently using libavcodec).

Any ideas or suggestions anyone has would be much appreciated. I apologize if this is in the wrong thread, but it seemed logical to me.