Will lowering audio bitrate mess up DVD playback?

[Gradlock]

Wasn't sure where to place this since it dealt with audio and DVD. I've got a couple of AC3 files for a movie and was thinking about saving space by reducing to 192Kbps since they are encoded at 448, which seems excessive to me. Will it mess up playback to reduce the bitrate?

[TRILIGHT]

Yes, you can lower the bitrate. However, considering you're only going to gain 5-10min. extra recording space, is it really worth it to screw up perfectly good audio? The majority of the space requirement is for video.

Some examples for you... If your video averages 6Mbps, you're only gaining 4 minutes by going to 192. If your video averages 3Mbps, you're gaining about 14 minutes of recording space.

If you're working with 2 hours of video and you're using 448kbps, your bitrate available for the video would be about 4.5Mbps. If you drop the audio to 192kbps, you end up with approx 4.7Mbps available for video. Is it really worth screwing up the audio for a mere 0.2Mbps increase in the video bitrate?

[Gradlock]

Thanks for the info Trilight. The reason is that I'm rencoding The Count of Monte Cristo and when I demuxed the audio tracks it came up with six AC3 files which range between 350MB to 500MB each, about 2G just for the audio. I finally obtained a working copy of CCE and the quality if outstanding to say the least. Encoded LOTR at about 2.5G and the was hard to tell the diff from the original except for a few scenes. I might try to get rid of the 2ch tracks and just keep the 6ch and audio commentary just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to screw things up like getting the audio out of synch but this info is really good to know though. I knew I wasn't going to be getting much space out of reducing the size but I hate to encode a movie and then have it be too big by only 10-20MB to fit on a disc. I guess what I'll do is just encode the movie and decide which file to reduce or get rid of.