Is there any benefit to getting all relevant audio tracks? For instance one of my first rips has Dolby 7.1, 5.1 and stereo. VLC seems to handle them all fine with only the 2 speakers at my computer. I assume most any halfway decent modern software will do the same.
I think the Dolby 7.1 stream sounds the best of the 3 and keeping only that one would optimize the file size, so long as it will not cause problems with future playback.
Multiple Audio Tracks
Re: Multiple Audio Tracks
Ripping, I get all of them. Post-rip processing, I cut out a lot, based on my usage. Sometimes, I find that the 5.1 track is NOT the audio from the feature... that's only stereo.
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Re: Multiple Audio Tracks
Hopefully to better answer this both for you AND for any future people with this question (though people seem to never search any more before asking a question again despite it being answered 100's of times before...).charlie2025 wrote: ↑Mon Jun 02, 2025 10:59 pmIs there any benefit to getting all relevant audio tracks? For instance one of my first rips has Dolby 7.1, 5.1 and stereo. VLC seems to handle them all fine with only the 2 speakers at my computer. I assume most any halfway decent modern software will do the same.
I think the Dolby 7.1 stream sounds the best of the 3 and keeping only that one would optimize the file size, so long as it will not cause problems with future playback.
Grab all the audio of the language you want, then determine what it is in the output file and use a different tool (I suggest MKVToolNix) to remove the audio you want to not retain.
In all media where I found 1 track labeled as higher quality than the others (example: 7.1 ch & 5.1 ch & Stereo), the highest quality is always the main audio.
Outside of that exact situation, there are too many possibilities.
I found many where 1 of the extra audio was a stream of descriptive audio, which I have no need to waste drive space for.
I found many where 1 of the extra audio was a commentary stream, which I prefer keeping but usually prefer a lower quality to save space.
I also found many where there are multiple tracks labeled as the same quality and therefore impossible to determine what is what before you rip & listen.
That said, there are some situations where retaining the extra audio of a lower quality can be beneficial.
Example: You have a 7.1 stream & a stereo stream. You try to play the file on a device which cannot read the 7.1 stream. If you drop the stereo to save the tiny amount of space it would save, now you cannot hear any audio on the device unable to play 7.1.
Example: The 7.1 stream is DTS:X and the playback device supports only Dolby or supports plain DTS but not DTS:X. Having a fallback can be helpful in those situations.
Note: The stereo streams on every disc I ever checked (both DVD & bluray) is always CBR (Constant BitRate), usually Dolby Stereo. I nearly always transcode the resulting file to compress & save space of the video while attempting to retain a near-indistinguishable image, and while doing that I convert the stereo from CBR to VBR (Variable BitRate) in AAC form, which is readable by damn near every player of any type and saves additional space.
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Re: Multiple Audio Tracks
Due to how DTS-HD and DTS-X are encoded, you don't need to rip the core separately; the audio stream includes the core, and any player that can only parse lossy DTS should only see the core (if you need to extract the core for space savings, you can run the MKV back through MakeMKV or via ffmpeg with
-bsf:a dca_core -acodec copy).
For DTS-HD 7.1 (and DTS:X), I usually convert the 5.1 core to AC3 for compatibility, while keeping the lossless track (since multichannel AAC isn't well supported, unlike mono and stereo, but 5.1 AC3 is very well supported).
For Dolby TrueHD though (usually Atmos nowadays), you do want to save the "core", since it's not an actual "core", but rather a separate interleaved lossy stream that gets tossed when remuxing to MKV.