Hi MrC,
I found the post where I published my 8-ch audio findings:
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.p...90#post1893390
Unfortunately I did not keep my test clips, and demo-world.eu closed shop recently.
But you could use AVSMeter instead of MediaInfo to retrieve the number of audio channels which the currently used source filter actually sees. No idea if this is feasible...
For the external player issue I made more tests, this time including WinXP and Win7-64. Results:
WMP and Tiny Player worked under both OS
MPC-HC 32 gave this error:
https://i.postimg.cc/HxC6bPHS/MPC-HC-32.png
VirtualDub 1.6.19 did not find an audio decompressor:
https://i.postimg.cc/nrS5KY3C/VDub-Error.png
https://i.postimg.cc/0N5B4Bhb/VDub-Info.png
For me especially VDub is an excellent replacement for the internal preview, because it allows me to do multiple cuts (editing out commercials), and with the help of a small utility called VCF2AVS the edit points can be translated into AviSynth Trim commands.
And as I already mentioned the problems disappear when I use FFMS2 or DirectShowSource, so it must be related to the fact that A2DSource.avsi lies in a different folder so the plugins it tries to load do not load correctly. This happens only for the preview, the encoding is not affected.
Cheers
manolito
//EDIT//
Good news, I managed to solve the problems with the external players...
For MPC-HC it was necessary to copy all the plugin DLLs from the "AVStoDVD\Lib" folder into the "AviSynth\plugins" folder. Easy enough, and I do not expect any adverse effects as long as the plugins in both folders are identical.
For VDub I believe that my old version 1.6.19 was to blame. Upgrading to the latest VDub2 version solved it, and so far this VDub version seems to work nicely even on my ancient desktop computer.