Is it possible to strip the atmos layer from an eac3 track without reenconding?

MKV playback, recompression, remuxing, codec packs, players, howtos, etc.
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n1o0nkerl1cKz
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2022 7:14 pm

Is it possible to strip the atmos layer from an eac3 track without reenconding?

Post by n1o0nkerl1cKz »

Hi,

simple question:

I have a video with an EAC3 (Dolby Digital Plus) audio track that includes a Dolby Atmos Layer.

I want to remove the Dolby Atmos Layer but keep the 5.1 layer and i do not want reencode the EAC3 track.

Is this possible?

The goal is to save space. Please do not suggest to just buy a new / bigger hard drive. This is not helpful.

I did some research, but I am confused because there are a lot of sciolist answers.

These posts suggest it is not possible without reenconding but the posters do not seem credible:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffmpeg/comment ... by_digial/
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/401 ... -E-AC3-5-1
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1927113

This 4 year old thread gave me hope but I did not understand much: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/7574

I signed up here because this forum seems to be super friendly towards newbies and users offer straight forward advice. :)
Woodstock
Posts: 9912
Joined: Sun Jul 24, 2011 11:21 pm

Re: Is it possible to strip the atmos layer from an eac3 track without reenconding?

Post by Woodstock »

mkvtoolnix. Take the track out of the MKV. As long as you have another audio track, it should be fine, although you can tell the output file to tag a different audio track as default (a good idea).
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n1o0nkerl1cKz
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2022 7:14 pm

Re: Is it possible to strip the atmos layer from an eac3 track without reenconding?

Post by n1o0nkerl1cKz »

i don´t think it is possible to do that with mkvtoolnix.
at least i don´t know how to.

but thanks for your suggestion.
ArArdin
Posts: 187
Joined: Fri Nov 20, 2020 1:40 pm

Re: Is it possible to strip the atmos layer from an eac3 track without reenconding?

Post by ArArdin »

I never came across a way to strip Atmos or JOC audiopackets and metadata from their flatbed TrueHD or EAC3 stream. If it is possible somehow, I'd also like to know.

Same goes for extracting 5.1 AC3 core which (UHD)BD mandatorily carries in EAC3 (with or without JOC btw). To my knowledge, mkvtoolnix offers no "reduce to core" option with EAC3 streams.
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