AC3Jack is a Tool for creating an AC-3 (Dolby Digital) multichannel stream from its JACK input ports. Using this tool, an AC-3 stream (up to 5.1 channels) is created in real time and either written to a file or streamed to a SPDIF output.
If the SPDIF port on your audio interface for connection to a multichannel Surround receiver, you can achieve full 5.1 surround mixing and monitoring of your JACK applications with a single digital cable, and no need for hardware supporting discrete outputs and inputs.
AC-3 is a compressed audio stream, so quality will suffer somewhat, but it is the price you pay for easy surround sound. The AC-3 encoder used here comes from the Aften project and although the sound quality seems good, I haven't seen any direct quality comparisons with commercial encoders.
