MPEG Multichannel
MPEG Multichannel, also known as MPEG-2 Backwards Compatible, or MPEG-2 BC, is an extension to the MPEG-1 Layer II audio compression specification, as defined in the MPEG-2 Audio standard (ISO/IEC 13818-3) which allows it provide up to 5.1-channels (surround sound) of audio. To maintain backwards compatibility with the older 2-channel (stereo) audio specification, it uses a channel matrixing scheme, where the additional channels are mixed into the two backwards compatible channels.