Audio Help

[nickkallis]

Hey All,

So I mainly rip and convert via Handbrake to stream or run on my AppleTV2 and iPad. I am curious about the audio options and have a few questions.

1. Should I be selecting both 3/2 +1 as well as True HD when I rip?
-If so will my device select the appropriate one?

2. Since MKV now supports TrueHD will that file or a DTS-HD file play on an iPad or iPhone or do I need a receiver to convert that?

3. Finally is the 3/2 +1 file a surround sound file? (sorry if this is noob question but I wanted to confirm what exactly it was).

4. Any other tips or information are welcome.

Any and all help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Smithcraft]

Hello there!

Since your target playback system(iOS devices) does not support HD Audio, I would say that ripping those tracks is a waste of time. Of course it might be faster to rip with everything and then only transcode with Handbrake the streams that you want, or can use.

If you wanted to keep the HD audio tracks you would need something that can handle them for playback. As far as I know OS X does not play nice with HD Audio.

The 3/2.1 stream is the 5.1 surround stream.

SC

[nickkallis]

Thanks for the swift reply. That makes sense. So if I ripped both and then chose both streams in Handbrake I should be okay to future proof myself?

Ie The iOS device would just play the 3/2 +1 and ignore the HD audio stream?

Also for the 5.1 surround stream, is it a Dolby Digital or DTS surround stream usually on a Blu-Ray (or something else) these days or does it just depend from title to tile?

[Smithcraft]

The iOS device doesn't handle AC3 or DTS, so you have to transcode to AAC. You would set the AAC track as the first audio stream and then have the AC3/DTS track for the second stream. To really future proof, you would then have the TrueHD/DTS-HD track as the third track.

It looks like many Blurays are going towards DTS, but many are still AC3/TrueHD, so it really just boils down to the title as to what audio streams it's gonna have. Just to note - Bluray AC3 has close to 50% more signal than DVD AC3, so it's not that bad! Then some Blurays use LPCM. I'm almost starting to like LPCM since it can push an HD grade signal without OS X pitching a fit.

SC

[Icanseestars]

You cant really use MKV on iOS devices anyway, the Apple Quicktime player will only enable hardware accelerated decoding on H.264 video in M4V/MP4/MOV containers anything else is barred so all the media players on the app store use the iPad CPU only. This means it does not decode the video as well and drains the battery faster.

One way around that is to jailbreak and use XBMC which enables the H.264 hardware decoding on all container types.

You can do AC3 in M4V so I'd go with that if planning on keeping 5.1 for other platforms later.