I'll start by saying that I tripped onto JRiver because I was looking for a player to solve this problem, and it turns out that even though JRiver did NOT solve the issue, it IS the media center that I've been looking for since I built this HTPC, so cheers and thanks.
I have two mkv's and an m2ts that say that they contain 7.1 dts-ma audio, but I cannot get better than 5.1 in TMT5, VLC, WMC with lots of codecs, or JRiver.
in fact, in each case, the player itself doesn't seem to recognize that there is an eight channel track when I play them, just six channel, on all of the platforms listed, but the encoder and the mediainfo program are telling me otherwise.
-dolby-hd 7.1 plays without issue.
-I verified that an 8 channel track was encoded using this
http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en program
jriver settings: wasapi out, 7.1 speakers, 24 bit depth
system:
core2duo@2.4GHz
nvidia gt430
harman-kardon 247 (via hdmi)
I have banged around with programs and settings for days, to no avail, with consistently elusive results. any ideas?