Complete newbie here, only discovered JRiver today & haven't yet even installed the demo. I am, however a sound engineer of 40 years' experience… but in 'music' not 'cinema' & so my 5.1 knowledge is quite limited by comparison.
One thing I need to clarify is how 5.1 is handled internally.
I've long been of the impression that 'pre-encoded' 5.1 from video files cannot be handled as such within the Mac.
I would dearly like to implement my own audio compression in an equivalent of JRiver's 'night mode' - in effect compressing the explosions & keeping the dialog channel bright & clear. To do this, I'd love to be able to use AU or VST, specifically Waves 360 series of processors, which I have for both formats. So far, I've never been able to get these to insert on any output, as they all appear to read as 'stereo' not multichannel 5.1.
I posted a question on this to Stack Exchange quite some time ago -
https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/45949/mac-pro-3-1-true-5-1-control-over-outputs - but discovered from Rogue Amoeba's support that this didn't seem to be possible. I'm currently using their SoundSource intercepting VLC but just with a stereo linear-phase multiband comp, which does the job but confuses the staging.
Can JRiver's player intercept the audio as 5.1 in some way, so I could attempt to insert a dedicated 5.1 plugin into my output chain?