Clone DVD Mobile Audio Question

[phenixdragon]

I have a bunch of my DVDs currently stored on my Home Server just as MPEG2 files. I wanted to see about converting them over to H.264 so I can play them on my iPad when I travel but I also still want them to play on my Windows Media Center, which my understanding is they will. What I want to know though, if I change them to H.264 with AAC sound, will my surround sound receiver at home still play 5.1 sound even though the code has been converted to AAC?

[Waethorn]

Most home theatre systems expect surround sound audio in AC-3 (Dolby Digital) or DTS format. Few support AAC multichannel, and many AAC conversion programs end up just downsampling to stereo anyway (dunno about CloneDVDmobile, but I doubt it's any different). Most home theatres that support AAC will be newer systems with HDMI switchers and 7.1 audio support (even if you only have 5.1 speakers). Older systems with only SPDIF and 5.1 probably won't support AAC at all.

Best option for the file size is the keep the audio in AC-3 and use either H.264 for video compression, or keep it in original MPEG-2 from DVD. Some DVD's are hard to compress, especially when the studios use really un-uniform interlacing. Since most H.264 compressors want to convert into progressive scan, that can sometimes be a problem. I have a number of DVD's like this myself, and H.264 at full quality (which should be no more than 1/2 the bitrate of DVD MPEG-2) is just plain awful when it converts, that I've resorted to storing files as standard MPEG-2 with AC3 and just strip all the other crap out of the DVD. Just stripping out the extra garbage and unused audio and commentary tracks will usually get a movie down to about 4GB or less with no additional compression. You might think leaving the original video interlaced is going to look bad, but many of these DVD's in MPEG-2 format end up taking advantage of realtime deinterlacing, and they look great on my PS3 on my HDTV too - just as good as the original DVD in the PS3, which means the PS3 is performing the same filtering on MPEG-2's as for a disc.

As far as the iPad goes, you'll be stuck with bigger file sizes unless you use H.264.

[phenixdragon]

Thanks for the reply.

It looks like my receiver does support AAC being 5.1 so I need to play with it a bit. I actually am checking out Handbrake which seems to be a bit better then AnyDVD Mobile but I am still taking a look and comparing both.