AC3 (Dolby Digital)

AC3 Audio, also referred to as "Dolby Digital", is one of the audio formats used in DVDs and is commonly used in Digital Television (certain Digital Video Capture cards may capture Digital TV signals containing AC3 audio).

There's a multitude of options for AC3 playback. The most common decoders are AC3 Filter, DScaler and FFDShow (you may need to enable AC3 support in FFDShow yourself within the Audio Decoder configuration page).

The DScaler decoder is pretty straightforward and provides little in way of customization. Find more information on the DScaler support forum (which also provide download links to the latest version).

The AC3 Filter contains a lot more flexibility in the form of Remapping Channels, transcoding and other power-features which may help trouble-shoot troublesome setups. It can even be used to encode non-AC3 audio into AC3 so that it can be passed along to an external receiver over S/PDIF.

Download AC3 Filter v1.11:
Mirror 1, Mirror 2.
MD5: EFA097932191AE68E62A11D4C628354B

Download Gabest AC3/DTS XForm Filter (may be required by some decoders such as PowerDVD and WinDVD):
Mirror 1, Mirror 2.
MD5: E9B04E8CC19093FBD1BA25AD9BDDF0C6