Help with my HD-DVD frustration

[SamuriHL]

Indeed it does. Excellent!

[BigCoolJesus]

One last question/issue:

When eac3to is doing it's 3rd Pass : process and is creating the WAV file in the temporary folder (before the actual bluray structure is put together/finalized), the percentage complete bar will stall on 13% for about 10-12 minutes before continuing on at normal pace (usually it takes about 20-25 seconds for each percentage on my computer). The computer itself never freezes, nor does task manager report ClownBD/eacto3 as "Not Responding" and the final product comes out without any audio/video sync issues. It also says the above step is completed successfully at only 50-52%. Again, the final product is intact and in-sync.

It did this for 2Fast 2Furious, 40 Year Old Virgin, and just now did it for Anchorman. It did not do this for 300, I assume because 300 is a Dolby TrueHD audio track that does not need the conversion step like the aforementioned DD+ movies.

Is this just a simple known issue with the progress bar not reporting correctly?

Thanks

[SamuriHL]

No clue. As long as the end product comes out to your satisfaction I don't think it's an issue.

[BigCoolJesus]

I figured as much. Just trying to satisfy my curiosity, that's all.

Thanks again for everything

[BigCoolJesus]

OK, OK....hopefully this is my last question:

I just ripped Apollo 13 and the overall file size was 24.1GB, which when imported into ImgBrn reports as 26GB of disc space needed. If I re-rip using AC3 as the audio output (instead of unconverted), would I be able to makeup the extra space?

Also, should I use 640 as the bitrate setting when I check the AC3 audio format box?


Thanks!

[SamuriHL]

Probably. All we can say is try it. You only have time to lose.

[BigCoolJesus]

Originally Posted by SamuriHL

Probably. All we can say is try it. You only have time to lose.

True

What bit rate setting do I choose when using AC3 audio format? 640?
Can I use one of the lower bit rates to save space or no?

[SamuriHL]

You can, but, it will lower the quality since the original is higher bitrate. So at this point, re-encoding will lower the quality but also lower the size. It's a battle.

[BigCoolJesus]

So using AC3 with 640 bitrate shrunk the entire disc size down to 18GB Good enough for me

Looking at some of my finished rips with Media Info, the ones that I left unconverted (PCM audio) are showing 4-5GB of size just for the audio file. The audio file for Apollo 13, the one I made AC3, is showing 700MB file size.

Pretty big size difference between uncompressed (PCM) and compressed (AC3). I'll take it to stay under 25GB.

[YaniD]

ClownBD generally does the right thing, however LPCM is stored on Bluray in a different mapping order than as standard in say an mkv.

When ClownBD converts DD+ to LPCM, I think it just does it in standard mapping order, however when muxing into Bluray structure, LPCM needs to be remapped from standard to Bluray mapping and I don't think ClownBD allows for this.

ClownBD uses eac3to for audio processing and there is a switch in eac3to to remap to Bluray order. I think you can run ClownBD in batch mode and modify the batch file it uses to include this switch.

Depending on how you intend to playback your HD-DVD conversions and the formats the player supports, you can use eac3to to create an mkv from the video and convert DD+ to LPCM or FLAC (no need to remap the LPCM order), then mux into the final mkv with mkvmerge. FLAC will give you effectively losslessly compressed LPCM at TrueHD sizes. Unfortunately not many players support FLAC in mkv.

Being a lossless AV conversion, the mkv can be used as source for any future conversion to Bluray structure if, for example, a freeware TrueHD or DTS-HD MA encoder became available.

The important thing is to retain as much of the original HD-DVD quality as possible: converting DD+ to DD will lose something that can't be recovered later.

Unfortunately the studios have ensured that an HD-DVD->Bluray conversion is either not easy or takes up much more space. One has to be really obtuse to design LPCM on Bluray with a different mapping order to every other LPCM implementation.