How to use profiles on Mac?

[PJMurphy]

Hello all! I've spent the last few hours reading around the forums looking for some advice on how I can take a movie I am about to rip and make it so that the audio is transcoded to AC3 while also retaining a DTS copy, and I've hit a brick wall.

So, to be precise, the Movie is Captain America Civil War, which has a DTS audio track. My aim is to end up with three English audio tracks (DTS, AC3 transcoded from the DTS, and Commentary). I have used Makemkv enough to know my way around selecting particular audio streams and identifying what exactly they are. However, my research on this forum suggests that Makemkv offers DTS to AC3 encoding through the use of profiles? This sounds perfect, as I've spent hours ripping DTS audio tracks, converting them to AC3, and remuxing with Mkvtoolnix in the past. This is a process that takes a lot of extra time, CPU, and memory, and can be frustrating when things go wrong.

Now, this brings me to profiles: where are the xml files found and how do I use them? I have looked around my OSX directories, I have checked the 'General' folder, I have checked the package contents, and I can't find any xml files that contain any profile information. I can only select the presets, and cannot edit them. Likewise, I have no idea where to start in creating my own, and where to put it, etc. I'm starting to get confused to the point of frustration, so I was hoping I could leave this question here for some helpful experts that can answer it:

Is it possible to transcode DTS-->AC3 using Makemkv on Mac? Thank you in advance.

[Woodstock]

First - have you enabled Expert mode in your Preferences->General window? If not, do so.

In that same window, you will find a box labeled "MakeMKV Data Directory", which should contain a path. If it doesn't, create a directory that is user-accessible, and put its path in that box and click OK.

That will be where you want to store the XML files for your user-created profiles. The original default XML files will be found in appdata.tar in the directory where the PROGRAMS are installed.

The contents of the MakeMKV data directory are not touched during installs and updates, so your edits won't be overwritten or deleted.

As for converting DTS to other formats with MakeMKV, I've not played with that myself... I use handbrake for that, while compressing the video. Others will have to clue you in on that.