eac3to - audio conversion tool [Archive] - Page 2

zgx

20th May 2007, 13:18

this is the info for The Matrix TrueHD track.

Audio attribute :
Audio application mode : surround
Audio format : MLP
Sampling frequency : 48000
Sampling quantization : 24
Number of audio channels : 6
Number of audio streams : 8
Bitrate: 2544 Kbps

I get both 24-bit outputs with this track on Nero Showtime & PowerDVD 7.3.2911The Matrix TrueHD soundtrack is "1 682 946 322" bytes long. The movie is 136 minutes long. That gives it a bitrate of 1611 Kbps. That's about the same bitrate as a 6 channel 16/48 movie soundtrack compressed to FLAC.

Uncompressed 16 bit/48 kHz/6 channel PCM: 4500 Kbps
Uncompressed 24 bit/48 kHz/6 channel PCM: 6750 Kbps

It's hard to say but I do not believe it's possible to losslessly compress a 24/48 soundtrack from an action movie like The Matrix to 1611 Kbps and the way I see it they must have used a 16/48 source.

People here say that the least significant 8 bits are not zero as they should be. Is it possible that even if the TrueHD track is stored with the least significant 8 bits as zeros that the Nero Audio Decoder reads the 16 bit most significant bits and upsample them to 24 bit?

madshi

20th May 2007, 19:20

BTW do Nero's decoders work in Windows XP.
Yes, I'm running everything in XP.

madshi

20th May 2007, 19:23

this is the info for The Matrix TrueHD track.

Audio attribute :
Audio application mode : surround
Audio format : MLP
Sampling frequency : 48000
Sampling quantization : 24
Number of audio channels : 6
Number of audio streams : 8
Bitrate: 2544 Kbps
Where do you have this information from? Do you have a software which outputs this kind of information? 8 audio streams for MLP is extremely strange because to my best knowledge MLP only supports 6 channels!

FWIW, highdefdigest claims Matrix TrueHD to be 48/16:

http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/matrix_umc.html

zgx

20th May 2007, 20:05

Where do you have this information from? Do you have a software which outputs this kind of information? 8 audio streams for MLP is extremely strange because to my best knowledge MLP only supports 6 channels!

FWIW, highdefdigest claims Matrix TrueHD to be 48/16:

http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/matrix_umc.htmlI think the Matrix HDDVD actually has 8 different audio tracks. Look at my reply a few posts up for the information on The Matrix.

Neo Fagin

21st May 2007, 09:44

Another unusual error, this time with TrueHD (Matrix Reloaded)

Muxing evo's first audio track to raw. Please wait...
Converting the raw file to wav. Please wait...
sox.exe sox: Channels value '0' is not a positive integer
"sox" reported error code "1". A valid *.raw file was created sucessfully, though.

madshi

21st May 2007, 09:50

Neo Fagin

21st May 2007, 10:02

Just out of curiosity, what sox/aften commandlines does eac3to use during the conversion process?

madshi

21st May 2007, 10:05

Just out of curiosity, what sox/aften commandlines does eac3to use during the conversion process?
Depends on the audio tracks, of course... :)

Here's version 1.7:

http://madshi.net/eac3to.zip

There's a new option "-8". eac3to can currently not automatically find out how many channels the TrueHD track has, so it assumes 6 channels. If you know it to be 8 channels, use the "-8" option. I'm not sure how many channels Matrix has. Also I'm not sure if Nero's decoder is even able to output more than 5.1. Probably not. So the default (6 channels) is probably the right choice for Matrix, too.

Neo Fagin

21st May 2007, 10:23

Nero vision reports Matrix Reloaded to be 7.1 (and says it's unsupported by Nero at this time) but it does play audio despite the error, though I don't know if it's playing 5.1, stereo, mono or what. That may be the cause of the numerous problems the track is causing.

madshi

21st May 2007, 10:29

Well, the sox complaint you reported was a clear bug in eac3to. So you should retry with version 1.7. Maybe it works. But I guess decoding will probably be limited to 5.1 channels.

Neo Fagin

21st May 2007, 10:36

Retrying now, I'll let you know if it works or not.

Neo Fagin

21st May 2007, 10:58

Seems to work now.

May as well ask for a "feature" so to speak - since this tool writes raw/wav files to disk as intermediates to the process, would it be possible to make this tool capable of doing two transcodes at once if given the option - ac3 and flac on the same command line? Saves having to run it twice since the raw/wav files are already created on disk for either process individually.

madshi

21st May 2007, 11:08

Seems to work now.
So you have valid 5.1 now? Or were you able to get 7.1?

May as well ask for a "feature" so to speak - since this tool writes raw/wav files to disk as intermediates to the process, would it be possible to make this tool capable of doing two transcodes at once if given the option - ac3 and flac on the same command line? Saves having to run it twice since the raw/wav files are already created on disk for either process individually.
That's kind of difficult. The main problem is that for ac3 encoding eac3to keeps using 24bit (cause it's no disadvantage for final file size), while for flac recording the TrueHD track is converted to 16bit. So the raw files already differ.

Neo Fagin

21st May 2007, 11:22

So you have valid 5.1 now? Or were you able to get 7.1?
Not sure. All I know is before, it wrote a 3.5gb raw file and failed on the sox step, this time it wrote a 6.5gb raw file and is now in the middle of the wav transcode step. It's taking an immensely long time due to the size of the files involved. In this instance I'm doing ac3 so it'd only be 5.1 results. I'll make a flac track afterwards and see how it goes.
That's kind of difficult. The main problem is that for ac3 encoding eac3to keeps using 24bit (cause it's no disadvantage for final file size), while for flac recording the TrueHD track is converted to 16bit. So the raw files already differ.Ah. No worries, just figured it'd be a big time-saver.

madshi

21st May 2007, 11:53

Not sure. All I know is before, it wrote a 3.5gb raw file and failed on the sox step, this time it wrote a 6.5gb raw file and is now in the middle of the wav transcode step. It's taking an immensely long time due to the size of the files involved. In this instance I'm doing ac3 so it'd only be 5.1 results.
Well, you could feed sox any data, e.g. an "exe" file and it would still be happy. So that sox and ac3 encoding runs through is not yet a proof of that everything is fine. If the raw file contains 8 channels, but eac3to thinks it's 6 channels, the output will be "interesting". But let's just wait and see... :)

Neo Fagin

21st May 2007, 13:08

The output appears to be okay 5.1 AC3. I haven't loaded it into Vegas or the like to do a comparison with ac3 made from the eac3 via sonic, though, but during playback the channels all appear to be in the right spots etc.

Could it be possible to do the flac/ac3 at once transcode thing if the -keep24 switch is used, thusly both flac and ac3 would logically use the same 24-bit raw file? Flac's primarily an archival medium in this instance so filesize isn't a terrible concern. If not, no big deal, just the thought occured to me. I suspect it's maybe a half-dozen lines of code to implement at any rate.

zgx

21st May 2007, 13:08

Not sure. All I know is before, it wrote a 3.5gb raw file and failed on the sox step, this time it wrote a 6.5gb raw file and is now in the middle of the wav transcode step. It's taking an immensely long time due to the size of the files involved. In this instance I'm doing ac3 so it'd only be 5.1 results. I'll make a flac track afterwards and see how it goes.
Ah. No worries, just figured it'd be a big time-saver.If you make a FLAC track first then run:

flac -d yourflacfile.flac
aften -whateveroptions yourwavfile.wav

But as Madshi pointed out for FLAC files the PCM is converted to 16 bit first. But since most TrueHD tracks seams to use 16 bit source material it shouldn't really matter that much. The AC3 file will probably sound just the same.

madshi

21st May 2007, 13:24

Could it be possible to do the flac/ac3 at once transcode thing if the -keep24 switch is used, thusly both flac and ac3 would logically use the same 24-bit raw file?
In that case you can do a simple batch file like this:

eac3to some.evo some.wav -keep24
eac3to some.wav some.flac
eac3to some.wav some.ac3

That's as fast as you can get. If eac3to did this for you internally, it wouldn't be any faster.

since most TrueHD tracks seams to use 16 bit source material it shouldn't really matter that much. The AC3 file will probably sound just the same.
Well, if only true TrueHD decoder output was really 16bit when being fed a 16bit TrueHD track... :( I've just contacted Nero support about this problem. Hopefully they'll send me a useful reply.

ACrowley

21st May 2007, 13:40

mhh strange

When i want to type in the Nero HDDVD/BluRay Plugin Serial, Nero tells me i have to upgrade to newest Version first.

i use the lstest Version....?

zgx

21st May 2007, 13:40

I've just contacted Nero support about this problem. Hopefully they'll send me a useful reply.Yes lets hope they fix it would be awsome to get a bit perfect decode.

madshi

21st May 2007, 14:41

mhh strange

When i want to type in the Nero HDDVD/BluRay Plugin Serial, Nero tells me i have to upgrade to newest Version first.

i use the lstest Version....?
That's quite strange. Which version do you have? You should probably contact Nero support.

序列人

21st May 2007, 16:55

mhh strange

When i want to type in the Nero HDDVD/BluRay Plugin Serial, Nero tells me i have to upgrade to newest Version first.

i use the lstest Version....?

me to...
my ver. is Nero7.Premium.Reloaded.v.7.5.9.1.MULTiLANGUAGE...

madshi

21st May 2007, 17:05

As far as I can see the latest version is 7.8.5.0.

Darth Pinous

21st May 2007, 17:12

This means that the serial is wrong, nothing to do with a version problem. If you buy the plug-in from the Nero website, you will see that the serial they will give you is waaay different from the one you're trying to use...

Just tested Nero plugin to convert Matrix Reloaded Dolby TrueHD track into Wavpack lossless track. Man, what a killer audio track ! :cool:

I tried first to convert the WAV file to 16 bits with WaveWizard before converting it to Wavpack, then to convert directly the 24bit WAV file to Wavpack.

The 16bits Wavpack was 1,43 GB (which make a 1,5 Mbps average bitrate, quite dynamic movie !) while the 24bits Wavpack was 2,9 GB (I use option -h for Wavpack reencodes).

Despite the huge size difference, I couldn't hear any differences between the two audio tracks. So, not sure that there is one.

Does anyone know how to mux an elementary audio track (let's say a demuxed Dolby TrueHD track) in an EVO container or could anyone point me to a guide explaining how to do it ?

zgx

21st May 2007, 18:30

Does anyone know how to mux an elementary audio track (let's say a demuxed Dolby TrueHD track) in an EVO container or could anyone point me to a guide explaining how to do it ?"Sonic Scenarist Advanced Content" would be my best bet.

orbitlee

22nd May 2007, 04:33

Guys, don't bother madshi with the trouble by pirated nero keygen.

madshi, great work. I managed to build the filter chain in graphedit for TrueHD. Looks like it's time to consider the truehd source file :-)

BTW, I got a sample of m2ts with TrueHD audio track(from Blu-ray Nine Inch Nails), unfortunately nero splitter does not split it correctly(only ac3 audio track, no truehd).

madshi

22nd May 2007, 08:03

Guys, don't bother madshi with the trouble by pirated nero keygen.
Thanks! :)

madshi, great work. I managed to build the filter chain in graphedit for TrueHD. Looks like it's time to consider the truehd source file :-)
That would be very nice!!

Rectal Prolapse

22nd May 2007, 16:58

orbitlee: Confirmed. I couldn't get the NIN Blu-ray working with Nero either. No TrueHD track to select. :(

Borbus

22nd May 2007, 17:07

I'm using this with the Sonic Audio Decoder. I have the decoder set to environment quiet. I've tried converting eac3 to wav. I have the soundtrack in eac3 and ac3 from a DVD. Comparing eac3 decoded with this to ac3 decoded with foobar2000 this seems to be obviously dynamically compressed.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is it a bug with Sonic?

madshi

22nd May 2007, 17:18

Borbus

22nd May 2007, 18:46

Changing the environment setting doesn't seem to actually do anything. The environment setting you should be using is "Quiet" because this is when no dynamic range compression is applied.

I wish they made these options straight forward, e.g. Dynamic Range Compression, Off, On, Full rather than a confusing backward system.

madshi

22nd May 2007, 18:58

The environment setting you should be using is "Quiet" because this is when no dynamic range compression is applied.
Are you sure about that? I thought "Normal" would mean "Range Compression Off".

I wish they made these options straight forward, e.g. Dynamic Range Compression, Off, On, Full rather than a confusing backward system.
Very much agreed!!

tebasuna51

22nd May 2007, 19:13

Are you sure about that? I thought "Normal" would mean "Range Compression Off".
I agree too about the confusion.

But, at least in PowerDVD and the Azid decoder, "Normal" mean apply the attenuation (DRC) present in the ac3 stream.

"Quiet" or "None" mean don't apply at all DRC, preserving the full dynamic range.

"Half", "Heavy", ... mean apply a part or more than the DRC calculated at encoder time and present in the ac3 stream.

Borbus

22nd May 2007, 19:13

Well these are the options I remember PowerDVD having:

Quiet Environment: Experience the full dynamic range of Dolby Digital sound.
Normal Environment: Experience the compressed dynamic range of Dolby Digital sound.
Noisy Environment: Experience boosted sound. Strongly recommended for notebook users.

Also quoted here on Hydrogen Audio: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=53219

madshi

22nd May 2007, 19:23

Ah, thanks guys. But then Borbus sais: "Changing the environment setting doesn't seem to actually do anything." Hmmmm... Very confusing.

This discussion makes me think that maybe the problems with the 16/24 bit TrueHD output may also have to do with DRC? There's a setting for DRC in ShowTime, but not in the decoder settings dialog.

zgx

22nd May 2007, 19:47

Borbus

22nd May 2007, 19:51

Am I doing this right? I'm changing the environment setting in the Cineplayer DVD Decoder Options in the Control Panel. It does throw up some weird error when I quite that but the setting seems to apply.

madshi

22nd May 2007, 21:07

Sounds right to me.

XeroFightsAlone

23rd May 2007, 00:02

What does this error entail?

"Connecting pins (2) failed."

I have no video track in my evo file, only TrueHD audio.

madshi

23rd May 2007, 07:26

What does this error entail?

I have no video track in my evo file, only TrueHD audio.
Do you have the Nero HD-DVD/Blu-Ray registered?

Revgen

23rd May 2007, 07:59

madshi

23rd May 2007, 08:21

Is there a way that you could add DTS support too?

For some reason, the libavcodec decoders don't decode the DTS audio from my Basic Instinct HD-DVD very well. There's pops and clicks throughout. The Sonic Decoder plays them fine.
Well, you could try using the same way you need to go for TrueHD, that is: Use EvoDemux to create one EVO file with nothing but one audio track in it. I think this should also work with DTS, although I haven't tested that yet.

Revgen

23rd May 2007, 09:13

Eh, nevermind. This Basic Instinct track appears to have problems even with Sonics decoder, only in different parts of the file.

Looks like I'll have to use the AC3 track from my DVD version.

madshi

23rd May 2007, 09:18

Eh, nevermind. This Basic Instinct track appears to have problems even with Sonics decoder, only in different parts of the file.
Well, going the EVO way I suggested, you'd be using the Nero decoders.

Revgen

23rd May 2007, 09:53

Well, going the EVO way I suggested, you'd be using the Nero decoders.

Well, I haven't bought nero yet. It'll take me a month or so before I can afford it. Guess I'll just have to wait.

Borbus

23rd May 2007, 11:54

Thanks for quoting me Borbus. This is something that has been bothering me for some time now. Why can't they just make it user friendly instead of complicating things? As far as I know only DD/AC3 and TrueHD and probably also DD+/EAC3 has metadata used by DRC.

Does Sonic actually output anything different when you change the settings? I've tried loud, normal and quiet and it always gives me the same output which is dynamically compressed.

moshmothma

23rd May 2007, 20:14

I take it I cannot use Nero Directshow filters to playback TrueHD at this point? How is playback of HDDVD and Bluray with Nero Showtime? Thanks

madshi

23rd May 2007, 21:43

I take it I cannot use Nero Directshow filters to playback TrueHD at this point?
I think you can, but you have to rename the media player to "recode.exe".

Pumpa

23rd May 2007, 22:22

New Ahead Nero v7.9.6.0, so maybe new filters ???

ACrowley

24th May 2007, 08:22

Well, you could try using the same way you need to go for TrueHD, that is: Use EvoDemux to create one EVO file with nothing but one audio track in it. I think this should also work with DTS, although I haven't tested that yet.

Strange

I had Clicks ans Pops with Perfume HDDVD DTS (core)Track

First i demuxed it with evodemux and had the cracking in the dts core.
But demuxed with Graphedit and SonicHDDemuxer it plays clean
Maybe you try it

Never had an clicks etc in a HDDVD DTS HD Track with AC3Filter since i demux DTS HD with SonicHDDemuxer