Probably not very relevant right now but apparently Dolby pushed their new ac4 codec as part of new digital TV standart..

so.. it might be encountered in new broadcasts. 

ffmpeg decoder was already written, but not in any release or even main tree

see

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/8349

and last comment pointing at recent-ish rebase

https://github.com/makrsmark/FFmpeg/commits/ac4

if I understand correctly only mpeg transport stream currently supported as container, and not, say, mp4.