Would also get around the problem of my TV automatically downmixing AAC surround to stereo instead of passing it through

@mparley Same issue on mine, the only surround sound that makes it through a HDMI ARC connection on my Android TV is either AC3 or EAC3. It supports AAC but it will play as PCM 2.0 instead of 5.1. The pull request above adds preferences to change this, basically disable all but AC3 and EAC3 in the settings and select EAC3 as the preferred transcode codec. That will change any AAC or TrueHD or other audio into EAC3 from the server side.

This would be great for me. I recently changed to a Sony TV running Google TV and am running into the issue of AAC surround sound not working (playing only as stereo). AC3 surround sound works just fine. I could re-encode every AAC file I have, but I'd like to avoid that.

Interestingly, AAC 5.1 worked on my prior Roku TV (but 7.1 would entirely have no sound).

Can confirm this is a problem on Sony Bravia Google/Android TV's. All aac multichannel tracks are downconverted to PCM 2.0.

In my setup it's being decoded to multi-channel PCM, not stereo.
More info: #1753 (comment)

Same issue here with a nVidia Shield Pro (2019) > HDMI > Samsung The Frame 2022 (model QE50LS03BGUXZT) > HDMI (eARC) > Sonos Beam Soundbar. All my cables are HDMI 2.1. Having such a feature would likely solve my problem.