I am new to the topic and just wanted to have a quick feedback for my audio settings in Handbrake. I don't have any 5.1 or 7.1 audio equipment, but would like to preserve that audio source while still avoiding audio transcoding all the time. So I thought I could pass through the original surround audio, and add an additional audio source which mixes the surround audio down to 256kbit AAC stereo. Does that make sense? Please see my attached screenshot:
My config (in the bottom there is a screenshot of the available channels)
maybe my workflow is odd, but I pass absolutely zero audio through with handbrake. I only do the video file, and then use mkvtoolnix to add the audio files back in so they're completely untouched by handbrake. They come direct from the raw rip from makemkv
