FLAC Audio

[DavidW]

I've been an occasional user of Make MKV for my ~30 DVD and BD discs that I have. Most of my collection are audio files and those of a DVD/BD origin are concert or music documentaries. My goal with Make MKV is to record the best audio (and video) when I rip DVD/BDs.

When I rip or download audio from CDs and other sources, I always do so as uncompressed FLAC files. I thought I was doing the same with the DVD/BDs but now see that under Preferences => Advanced, there is a setting for FLAC that is different from the default. What is the audio codec of "Default"?

Thanks.

[DavidW]

An update-

I went in and changed "Default" to "FLAC" and re-ripped the same disc. Surprisingly, the size of the disc (in GBs) was reduced. I would have thought if the codec went from AAC (or whatever the default is) to FLAC, the overall size would increase, and could increase dramatically.

The image on the right (created on March 5) was ripped with the default, and the image on the left (created on March 9) was ripped with FLAC:

Screen Shot 2021-03-08 at 8.16.48 AM.png (501.59 KiB) Viewed 9625 times

[Woodstock]

The default is to pass through the audio in the same format it is on the disk; DTS-HD MA on disk is copied to DTS-HD MA in the MKV file. You can also get the "base" DTS audio copied out of the lossless track (my profile is set up to select it), for compatibility purposes.

By converting to FLAC, you get one audio track instead of (up to) two per on-disk format.

[dcoke22]

There's a tool called MediaInfo (https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo) that's probably easiest to install on MacOS using Homebrew (https://brew.sh) that'll tell you all sorts of details about your media files.

In terminal, a command like this:

Code: Select all

mediainfo path/to/movie.mkv

will show you details about the file. Here's a subset of the audio from one.

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Audio #1
ID                                       : 2
ID in the original source medium         : 4352 (0x1100)
Format                                   : MLP FBA 16-ch
Format/Info                              : Meridian Lossless Packing FBA with 16-channel presentation
Commercial name                          : Dolby TrueHD with Dolby Atmos
Codec ID                                 : A_TRUEHD
Duration                                 : 1 h 58 min
Bit rate mode                            : Variable
Bit rate                                 : 3 810 kb/s
Maximum bit rate                         : 7 158 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 8 channels
Channel layout                           : L R C LFE Ls Rs Lb Rb
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate                               : 1 200.000 FPS (40 SPF)
Bit depth                                : 24 bits
Compression mode                         : Lossless
Stream size                              : 3.17 GiB (5%)
Title                                    : Surround 7.1
Language                                 : English
Default                                  : Yes
Forced                                   : No
Original source medium                   : Blu-ray
Number of dynamic objects                : 11
Bed channel count                        : 1 channel
Bed channel configuration                : LFE

Audio #2
ID                                       : 3
ID in the original source medium         : 4352 (0x1100)
Format                                   : AC-3
Format/Info                              : Audio Coding 3
Commercial name                          : Dolby Digital
Codec ID                                 : A_AC3
Duration                                 : 1 h 58 min
Bit rate mode                            : Constant
Bit rate                                 : 448 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 6 channels
Channel layout                           : L R C LFE Ls Rs
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate                               : 31.250 FPS (1536 SPF)
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Stream size                              : 381 MiB (1%)
Title                                    : Surround 5.1
Language                                 : English
Service kind                             : Complete Main
Default                                  : No
Forced                                   : No
Original source medium                   : Blu-ray

Audio #1 is the lossless TrueHD audio track and audio #2 is the Dolby Digital 'core' of that TrueHD track. My home theater system can't process TrueHD or DTS-MA tracks, but it can process lossless FLAC, so I use the same functionality you discovered to also rip a version with FLAC instead.

Code: Select all

Audio #1
ID                                       : 2
ID in the original source medium         : 4352 (0x1100)
Format                                   : FLAC
Format/Info                              : Free Lossless Audio Codec
Codec ID                                 : A_FLAC
Duration                                 : 1 h 58 min
Bit rate mode                            : Variable
Bit rate                                 : 2 697 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 8 channels
Channel layout                           : L R C LFE Lb Rb Ls Rs
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate                               : 10.417 FPS (4608 SPF)
Bit depth                                : 24 bits
Compression mode                         : Lossless
Stream size                              : 2.24 GiB (3%)
Title                                    : Surround 7.1
Writing library                          : MakeMKV v1.15.3 darwin(x64-release)
Language                                 : English
Default                                  : Yes
Forced                                   : No
Original source medium                   : Blu-ray

That's the same movie, but you can see that the FLAC version of the TrueHD audio track is only 2.24 GiB vs. 3.17 GiB in the TrueHD version.

You can change with audio profile MakeMKV uses on a per rip basis by selecting the desired profile in the dropdown box on the right side of the window, just under the MakeMKV button.

profile.jpg (18.67 KiB) Viewed 9618 times