Audio streams and channels come in a wide variety of formats. In the spirit of keeping things simple, we support, by default, a single stereo stream and an eight-stream configuration for 5.1 audio. Which covers 90+% of the content you would be dealing with.
Please note, other options can be configured on request.
2 Channels or Stereo
This is the common case, which is often called Left / Right audio and is supported across all devices. This is where there is a single audio stream with two channels.
Channel 1 - Left
Channel 2 - Right
8 Channel or 5.1 Surround Sound
This is a specific arrangement of audio channels that supports encoding both for surround sound devices and for stereo supported devices.
If the audio streams have been labeled, the encoder will use these. If the audio streams haven't been labeled, the following order is assumed.
Stream 1 - Left (FL)
Stream 2 - Right (FR)
Stream 3 - Centre (FC)
Stream 4 - Low-Frequency Effects (LFE)
Stream 5 - Left Surround (BL)
Stream 6 - Right Surround (BR)
Stream 7 - Downmix Left (DL)
Stream 8 - Downmix Right (DR)
We support either each channel residing in its own audio track/stream or all audio channels being contained in a single stream/track. If the channels are all in a single stream, they must be in the order specified above.
By default we do not support a mixture of single-stream channels and multi-channel streams in the same file. We do have a feature to use multiple audio tracks in the same film file.