Today, I played with the just-released update of 8player (
AppStore link; the
free version is definitely worth giving a try, particularly if you're into UPnP), an excellent UPnP media player (and a not-so-decent local one).
Upon tapping a direct camera AVCHD test file (as has been explained in several of my articles, they all contain AC-3 audio tracks), I've seen the following message:
[url=https://dl.dropbox.com/u/81986513/122012/01-ffmpeg-ios/ffmpeg4iosIn8PlayerHelp1t.jpeg]Image[/URL]
(as with all images in this article, click the thumbnail for the original shot!)
I've tapped the FAQ button and what did I read (pay special attention to the annotated part)?
[url=https://dl.dropbox.com/u/81986513/122012/01-ffmpeg-ios/ffmpeg4iosIn8PlayerHelp2t.jpeg]Image[/URL]
Yes, you can, by adding one single file to the Documents directory manually via iTunes,
re-enable AC-3!
All you need to do, as a user, is indeed going
HERE, downloading the single ZIP file linked there (currently, at version 1.0, from
HERE) and copying it, via iTunes, to the same directory as you'd do with standard videos:
[url=https://dl.dropbox.com/u/81986513/122012/01-ffmpeg-ios/ffmpeg4iosinDocsDirt.jpeg]Image[/URL]
(the ZIP is selected in the filelist)
This made 8player play back the AC-3 (and other Dolby) audio tracks again.
Needless to say, it works just fine without jailbreaking (above, you can see I've done this on a non-jailbreakable iPhone 5) and without using third-party apps like
iExplorer after all, all you need to do is putting a single file in the standard
Documents (and not, say,
Library) folder of the standard iTunes.
I've tested the same add-on ZIP file with the apps (
EC Player, It's Playing, BUZZ Player, HD Player Pro) listed in the previous screenshot. All of them had to remove AC-3 support (see
THIS article for the background). Unfortunately, none of them support the ZIP file, while the majority of them
is based on FFmpeg.
Hope this changes in the future, (also) these players adding support for using external, non-embedded, user-added libraries to play back this essential audio format, whose lack of support caused by Dolby's extremely high licensing fee demands, has made iOS as a whole a lot less desirable for generic multimedia playback now, I'm seriously considering getting a
Nexus 10 or a
Surface Pro (or even
RT if its price drops) for my video playback needs because of not only Apple's restricting hardware playback, making absolutely flawless MKV playback impossible if you don't jailbreak, but also developers being forced to remove AC-3. I again recommend checking out the user reviews collected in
my previous, dedicated article to see how acute this problem is and how much damage it has done to the entire platform.
My recommendation to developers is as follows: do the same as the 8player developers and, by telling users to copy the external codecs manually to your app, give us back AC-3 support. Hopefully Dolby can't do anything with
external libraries you don't
actively distribute with (inside) your apps and/or, at last, reconsiders their licensing fee demands and comes up with ones that are actually payable. Say, $0.3...$1/copy sold, depending on the AppStore price of the app itself (for example, a dev selling a $5 player can surely pay $1 per copy for a license but a $2 player can't), without any additional, e.g. annual fees - that is, no absolutely unreal punishments like $25k/year for developers of players that don't even sell that many copies a year.
UPDATE (03/Dec/2012): as is pointed out
HERE, in both versions of 8player, the AC-3 track of iOS-native files (mov / mp4 / m4v) is
only played back if you explicitly disable hardware acceleration by disabling (just switch off the switch at
Settings > Players > Video Player > Native Player). This, of course, doesn't need to be done with non-native containers - MKV's, AVI's etc. - as they're always played back in software, without utilizing hardware acceleration, independent of the state of the switch.
It works fine with my DLNA/UPnP devices in home and supports AC-3 as well. 
