eac3to - audio conversion tool

[madshi]

Originally Posted by earl

you mean this -> http://www.videohelp.com/tools/xport ?

Yes.

Originally Posted by earl

is there no way to demux my .m2ts file with eac3to ?

eac3to strictly wants clean rips. It refuses to work on damaged source files. xport is more relaxed and also allows damaged source files. Your source file seems to be damaged. So as I said in my previous comment, you can either rerip the movie to (hopefully) get a clean rip. Or you can use xport for demuxing. But if you do use xport on the damaged rip, obviously the demuxed files you'll get will contain some corruption.

[Chumbo]

Originally Posted by madshi

Why in the source path? Wouldn't it make more sense to write the log file to the destination path? I mean the source path might not even be writable while the destination path always has to be writable. Of course if you ask eac3to to just check a file things are getting complicated because then there is no destination path. Well...

Good grief, yes. I meant destination. Ugh. Thanks for catching that.

I guess if there's no destination path, you can always fall back on where eac3to is or provide a log file switch where we can enter specifically the path and name of the log file. That would at least save you the headache of having to do too many if-this-or-that checks.

Originally Posted by madshi

...things are getting complicated...

That cracked me up madshi. Like the stuff you've done isn't complicated enough, to hear you say the log option is complicated was pretty funny. Just incase someone misunderstands my jest here, I hope you understand the spirit in which I'm saying this, i.e., I have a lot of respect for the things mashi's accomplished in this program and all its complexities.

[EDIT] btw, I got my hands on delaycut 1.3 and did run the ddp file through it to fix the CRC errors and eac3to was able to transcode after it was fixed. Also, I was only able to demux it with EVOdemux. Do you think it's worth allowing eac3to to demux tracks even if they're "dirty" since in some cases, like this one, the track can be fixed?

[moshmothma]

Originally Posted by madshi

Not sure about that. If a programmer asked for it, I'd think about that, depending on the cirumstances and conditions etc...

But honestly, the Haali splitter is not bad at all. It currently has some limitations (e.g. no TrueHD splitting),

Madshi, I don't know how difficult it would be to do this but there are a couple of reasons....

1. You are far more in tune with HDDVD and Bluray codecs and concerns. You are also better plugged into this community.
2. Haali is not exactly the most responsive agent in the world I don't fault him (and in fact am very grateful for his filters) but it is frustrating communicating with him.
3. It is always good to have an alternative and competition. Different perspectives promote growth.

These are mainly selfish but say a lot about you and your efforts. I hope you will consider this request.

[bmnot]

Was just testing eac3to's blu-ray detection abilities.

Loaded in Queen Rock Montreal and it said for the DTS track
3: DTS Hi-Res, English, 5.1 channels, 24 bits, 3072kbit/s, 48khz

This is incorrect, the frequency is 96kHz.

[madshi]

Originally Posted by Chumbo

Do you think it's worth allowing eac3to to demux tracks even if they're "dirty" since in some cases, like this one, the track can be fixed?

I already posted some time before that maybe I'll add demuxing support (but probably not transcoding support) for dirty tracks some day.

Originally Posted by moshmothma

Madshi, I don't know how difficult it would be to do this but there are a couple of reasons....

1. You are far more in tune with HDDVD and Bluray codecs and concerns. You are also better plugged into this community.
2. Haali is not exactly the most responsive agent in the world I don't fault him (and in fact am very grateful for his filters) but it is frustrating communicating with him.
3. It is always good to have an alternative and competition. Different perspectives promote growth.

These are mainly selfish but say a lot about you and your efforts. I hope you will consider this request.

I'm sorry, but my answer is still no. In the commercial world competition can be a motivator for more development. In the freeware world competition often is a waste of resources IMO. I don't have the ambition to "beat" other programmers. And I will only duplicate other programmers' efforts only if I could really make a noticable improvement - and if I'm interested in that improvement myself. Most of my motivation for developing eac3to is just to satisfy my own needs. But personally I'm (more or less) satisfied with Haali's splitter for real time playback. So that's why I don't plan on my writing my own DirectShow splitter...

Originally Posted by bmnot

Was just testing eac3to's blu-ray detection abilities.

Loaded in Queen Rock Montreal and it said for the DTS track
3: DTS Hi-Res, English, 5.1 channels, 24 bits, 3072kbit/s, 48khz

This is incorrect, the frequency is 96kHz.

As has been said before, there's no documentation whatsoever available on DTS-HD. Because of that eac3to just reads out the parameters of the DTS core. In some cases the core parameters differ from the DTS-HD parameters. But don't worry, if you decode this track with the Sonic Audio Decoder, you'll correctly get 96khz. So it's really just a very minor problem.

[Rectal Prolapse]

I actually believe with moshmothma's sentiments - Haali, with all the great work he's done, isn't as responsive as we'd like (for many legitimate reasons, for sure!). LPCM playback from m2ts is still broken, and has been broken for nearly a year, is one example.

With that said, I'm hoping that the TS splitter in MPC could be modified for proper m2ts playback - the Haali Splitter I think does "too much" and that makes it much harder to get fixes incorporated and tested.

I'm sure Haali is busy with commercial products as well (isn't he involved with MKV implementations on the various media center hardware out there?).

As a programmer, I would be very interested in knowing how the Nero and Sonic decoders can be manipulated into providing the proper output - no need for you madshi to release source I think. Such information would be useful for creating a splitter that can interface with these decoders while preserving quality.

At the moment I'm busy with another project, so the above is just an example of what someone may request without actually getting source from madshi.

[madshi]

Originally Posted by Rectal Prolapse

I actually believe with moshmothma's sentiments - Haali, with all the great work he's done, isn't as responsive as we'd like (for many legitimate reasons, for sure!). LPCM playback from m2ts is still broken, and has been broken for nearly a year, is one example.

Broken LPCM playback is really bad, I agree with that. However, Haali has been responsive to me when I reported bugs with exact information what exactly is wrong and how to fix it. His latest version fixes several important bugs I reported to him.

[DeepBeepMeep]

I think we shouldn't under estimate the work to create a good Direct Show splitter. Such a splitter must be capable to estimate the duration of a video file (even with damaged files), support fast seeking, support various sub formats (e.g for transport streams: ATSC, DVB-T, M2TS, etc...).

It seems the latest Haali filter has fixed most of past reported bugs (beside the LPCM one). I think if madshi has some free time, It would be great if before anything else he could spend it on supporting multiparts m2ts files and muxing directly video and audio tracks into an mkv file.

[hero88]

I think i have found a bug:

I wanted to convert track 3 TRUEHD to PCM and I accidentally wrote :3uk.pcm instead of 3: uk.pcm

Then eac3to does what it should but creates a file called ":3uk.pcm" which is an invalid filename in windows, so you cannot find it afterwards, it does create the file as the diskspace was reduced by 3 gig afterwards

This is input to / output from eac3to

eac3to.exe 00000.m2ts :3uk.pcm
M2TS, 1 video track, 4 audio tracks
1: VC-1, 1080p24 /1.001 (16:9)
2: AC3, English, 5.1 channels, 640kbit/s, 48khz, dialnorm: 27dB
3: TrueHD/AC3, English, 5.1 channels, 48khz, dialnorm: -27dB
Extracting audio track number 2...
Removing dialog normalization...
Decoding with DirectShow (Nero Audio Decoder 2)...
Disabling DRC for Nero (E-)AC3 decoding...
DirectShow reports 5.1 channels, 24 bits, 48khz
Swapping endian...
Remapping channels...
Creating file ":3uk.pcm"...
eac3to processing took 13 minutes, 24 seconds.
Done.

Suggestion: a small check of filename to ensure it doesn't contain invalid characters like " ? / \ < >

[nautilus7]

And it would be even better if madshi could make directshow decoders instead of a splitter. Such thing isn't available yet.

[madshi]

Originally Posted by hero88

Then eac3to does what it should but creates a file called ":3uk.pcm" which is an invalid filename in windows, so you cannot find it afterwards, it does create the file as the diskspace was reduced by 3 gig afterwards

Actually it's a valid filename. It creates an NTFS substream for the current folder... See here:

http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs-multiple.htm

[hero88]

Ahh, you live you learn

Any idea on how to get to it? So I can delete it

[BLKMGK]

It seems like we're hearing lots of folks wanting Madshi to go one direction or another with his code and his time. I for one would like to simply say thank you for the code he has provided and say that I think he's moving in a direction that will continue to keep *me* pretty happy.

My primary motivation for using eac3to has been to convert HD-DVD disks to a format I can compress and then playback on my HTPC using Linux (XBMC). Now that HD-DVD is dead <sob> Madshi has begun to spend some time on the M2TS format and he's made progress. Without his work on the EVO format conversion of my library, which has grown thanks to price cuts, would've been much much much harder. His tool does much of the heavy lifting for me and for that I am very thankful. M2TS still cause me grief but I'm confident that as time passes his tool and others will mature, thankfully I've only got just the one BD disk to deal with right now. Prices being what they are I have plenty of time to hone my technique!

Anyway, I recognize this is a spare time labor of love for Madshi but his work has made my life easier and in the midst of folks asking him to go this way or that I wanted to make sure that he knows that many have greatly appreciated everything he has done so far. Yeah, there are directions I'd like to see him go too but I'm patient and if the need is great enough it'll be filled. Thankfully stuff I need seems to be pretty basic. <shrug> These formats and the ability to rip them are pretty new, I'm thrilled to be able to manipulate them to the extent I can.

[madshi]

Originally Posted by hero88

Any idea on how to get to it? So I can delete it

Just delete the directory from which you called eac3to. That should also get rid of the NTFS sub stream.

Originally Posted by BLKMGK

It seems like we're hearing lots of folks wanting Madshi to go one direction or another with his code and his time.

Fortunately I'm stubborn...

Originally Posted by BLKMGK

M2TS still cause me grief

Is there any grief besides those Blu-Ray titles with multiple parts? That's the only problem I'm aware of.

Originally Posted by BLKMGK

in the midst of folks asking him to go this way or that I wanted to make sure that he knows that many have greatly appreciated everything he has done so far.

Thanks.

[madshi]

eac3to v2.37 released

http://madshi.net/eac3to.zip

* added HD DVD chapter support
* added HD DVD subtitle demuxing support
* added pre-freeze detection for Haali Matroska Muxer bug
* invalid characters are removed from file names now
* log file is copied to destination path (of first destination file)

Edit: Fixed file path handling problem in v2.38.

[nautilus7]

Thanks for update, but i don't know how to use subs and chapters. Are they extracted only with -demux option? I used an evo file, but there wasn't a option in the track list for those.

[BLKMGK]

Chapter support, excellent I had someone asking me about that the other day and had to admit to being clueless about it, I'll tell them it's there!

BD disks, indeed the multiple versions that can be had on a single disk are an issue. It would be nice if the various paths could be presented like the languages are when info is gotten about a set of files. That said, the one BD disk I've got only has like 2 or 3 files so figuring out it's path was quite easy unlike some others I've heard about that are the stuff of nightmares with 20 or more pieces.

When I do HD-DVD it's simple, I use eac3to to pull vid out and put a vid stream into a MKV. meGUI then compresses the MKV further with x264, I combine the compressed file and AC3 audio with MKVmerge (I use -libav and 640), and then I'm done. No synch issues or other problems it just works.

When I tried to do much the same with M2TS files, admittedly a few weeks ago, things were not so smooth and the path slightly different. The resulting file had it's time displayed incorrectly and long seeks crashed my player - jumping to advance in the video could also crash it. At the end of the file the screen went black before the video was done and I just got audio. I do not know where the problem lies, my player is certainly suspect as it's under heavy development. I seem to recall using some other tools in the mix too unlike what I do with HD-DVd so the issue could have been there too.

Tell you what, I will redo the BD video attempting to use much the same process that I use with HD-DVD today (same AVIsynth script for instance) and the latest eac3to and let you know how it goes. As it happens I REALLY like the video in question (The Patriot) and would love to be able to watch it all the way through! (lol)

Edit: Uh Oh! Madshi, the new version of eac3to will NOT run under 64bit Vista. When I attempt to start it I get a message telling me it's not compatible - never seen this before!

D:\Video\eac3to>eac3to
This version of D:\Video\eac3to\eac3to.exe is not compatible with the version of Windows you're running. Check your computer's system information to see whether you need a x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then contact the software publisher.

[Henry The Ripper]

When I demuxed PCM from m2ts, it says "Remapping channels", then when encoding to DTS it's again "Remapping channels"??

So is the result the incorrect order?

2.37 and 2.38 don't start the encoding procedure with normal command line "eac3to source.pcm destination.dts"

[Encoder888]

@madshi

Just curious, are you planning on including support for Blu-Ray chapters at some point too? No rush, just wondering Thanks.

[Denner]

I am having problems with TOP GUN (HD-DVD), eac3to reports an audio delay of -84ms, an does its thing when re-encoding the Dolby True HD audio to FLAC.

But when I mux audio and video to MKV, the audio is out of sync (the audio is to early) and stays out of sync for the whole movie.

The HD-DVD plays fine both from the HD-DVD and from my harddrive.

This is the first time I am having audio sync problems with a FLAC file created by eac3to and the muxed in to an MKV file.

Have any of you re-encodet TOP GUN to MKV and if so did you experience any problem doing so?