It has been a while since I updated this. I promise a followup to my previous post about open source attitudes is coming up. I realized from the comments that a few of my statements didn’t come across exactly as I had intended them.
Well, with the Perian donations, Chris and I went to buy some AV equipment. This enables us to test out Perian in other situations than we had originally intended. Each of us got an AppleTV and a 5.1 system. As a result, I have already figured out a way to do AC3 passthrough in a much less hacky method, which means it should be more reliable. However, I found out that with some decoders, like the one my dad has, even this method still fails. Apparently, some decoders require that the SPDIF header specify that the data is encoded digital audio instead of searching for a correctly formatted header in the PCM data. Oh well.