There's not much I can add. Just tested LAV and got the following mapping:
Left and Right are actually mapped as flc and frc from looking at the output channel levels (in the status tab).
this is quite consistent with the ffdshow result as the mapping looks like:
left -> left + center
center -> center
right -> right + center
right surround -> right
left surround -> left
right rear surround -> right rear surround
left rear surround -> left rear surround
lfe -> lfe
Thanks to looking at the lav output I can at least tell for sure that the front channels are falsely outputted as front right center and front left center (not sure if that's the right labeling).
Now maybe we should also take a look IF by any chance the channel layout during the encoding is wrong even though vlc outputs the correct channel order.
At least we can tell for sure that the the 7.1 aac are "falsely" mapped as follows:
left -> flc
right -> frc
srl -> left
srl -> right
center, lfe, br, bl are correct. At least now in my eyes the behaviour is consistent and makes a lot of sense
cause if the front channels are really marked as frc and flc than it's correct that they are mixed into left, center and right on downmix ^-^;
edit:
take a look at:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#...ag_AAC_7_1
so it is an output issue
the channels are encoded correctly, but for 7.0 AAC the channel order is
Center, Left, Right, Left surround, Right surround, Left rear surround, Right rear surround
while for 7.1 it is
Center, Left center, Right center, Left, Right, Left surround, Right surround, Low-frequency effects
edit2:
I just posted a hint in the AE development thread... hopefully they'll not behead me for pushing this issue a bit ^-^;
edit3:
For lav I already got a postiive response for a fix! See:
http://code.google.com/p/lavfilters/issu...ail?id=304
Now let's hope that the we'll get a fix for xbmc, too