@dillee1:
Just to give some minor corrections to what you poster (sorry). I'm hanging out on HA for quite a while now and follow discussions with Menno (that's his name) Bakker and Ivan Dimkovic, the guys that work for Ahead.
1) aacenc.exe from RareWares (now
rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org ) still produces standard compliant AAC streams as it uses an MPEG2 ADTS header, which hasn't changed.
2) aacenc_mpeg4.exe from RareWares produced MPEG4 ADTS headers which weren't standard compliant due to some recent changes. Therefore that version was removed. Also recent updates were included in the mp4tools.rar package (version 0.9.8) that is hosted on RareWares.
3) For playback you are absolutely right. 3ivx + ffdshow: this is the combination that I use as well.
4) Some minor hint: Quicktime player still refuses in version 6.1 on Windows to play MP4 files which have an AAC audio track with MPEG2 ADTS header. I still don't know of any way how to change that. Maybe someone knows how to do that (bitstream is identical).
tiki4