I am currently working on making the switch from PES to TS as the VDR recording format, that's why there are currently no new versions of VDR.
However, since the German ARD channels are going to start broadcasting the standard AC3 component descriptor some time next week, I'm publishing the attached patch that implements this in VDR 1.7.0.
From what I have been told, Premiere was the first provider that actually broadcasted AC3 audio, and they chose not to use the standard stream content value of '4' ("AC-3 audio"), but instead used stream content value '2' with component type '5' ("MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio, surround sound"). And since they "certify" all their receivers, this wrong decision was quickly adopted by other broadcasters, and became a "pseudo standard".
Note that this patch is not necessary to receive AC-3 audio on the ARD channels. They will still be broadcasting the old descriptors in parallel with the new ones for about a year, so existing VDRs will work just fine. This is just to let people who like to test this actually do so.
The channel
MEHRKANALTEST;ARD:12421:hC34M2O0S0:S19.2E:27500:0:2001=deu;2002=deu:0:0:28397:1:1201:0
already broadcasts the new AC3 descriptor and can be used for testing (no video, just audio test tones).
Klaus