Quality of the WinDVD AC3 decoder

[Tropican]

For decoding AC3's to wav, how does azid compare to the WinDVD AC3 decoder? Also should I downsample before transcoding to MP3? What are the advantages of downsampling an AC3 source?

Thanks,
Tropican

[KpeX]

Quality is determined by the encoder, not by the decoder. All non-broken decoders will produce virtually the same output. There are no advantages to downsampling your audio, unless you consider reduced quality an advantage.

[Tropican]

Yes, sorry I misworded my question. What I meant to ask is are there any broken ac3 decoders? Is this one of them? Do some downmix multichannel better, etc.

Sorry I was not specific before,
Tropican

[KpeX]

I'm not very familiar with winDVD's decoder, but azid is pretty well tested. It's been around for quite a while and gets pretty extensively used in BeSweet and as a standalone app. Its downmixing (dpl, dplii, etc.) and other features are all well working.

AFAIK the only commonly-used ac3 decoder that has some reported problems is liba52 (used in ac3filter & others). Some users reported some occasional problem samples, but even this decoder is pretty stable.