eac3to - audio conversion tool

[madshi]

Btw did I do everything right in this E-AC3 448kbps to AC3:

eac3to filename.eac3 filename.ac3 -448 -libav
Well, what is "right" and what is "wrong"? Personally, I'd have chosen to reencode to 640kbps. Reencoding E-AC3 to AC3 is a lossy process. The higher you choose the bitrate of the final AC3 file the smaller the quality loss is. eac3to's default bitrate for AC3 encoding is (for multi channel audio tracks) 640kbps. You've decided to encode only with 448kbps. That's totally your decision. Everybody needs to find his own balance of file size vs. audio quality.

Also I got another track wich is Dolby TrueHD, is there anything eac3to can do with it to maybe get better audio than from E-AC3?
Sure. The TrueHD track will give you better audio quality than the E-AC3 track. eac3to can handle both, E-AC3 and TrueHD.

[Joniii]

Well, what is "right" and what is "wrong"? Personally, I'd have chosen to reencode to 640kbps. Reencoding E-AC3 to AC3 is a lossy process. The higher you choose the bitrate of the final AC3 file the smaller the quality loss is. eac3to's default bitrate for AC3 encoding is (for multi channel audio tracks) 640kbps. You've decided to encode only with 448kbps. That's totally your decision. Everybody needs to find his own balance of file size vs. audio quality.


Sure. The TrueHD track will give you better audio quality than the E-AC3 track. eac3to can handle both, E-AC3 and TrueHD.

Oh, I didn't know it is lossy, gotta redo with 640kbps then.

Also in wich format do I have to decode Dolby TrueHD and wich commands to use (with best quality)?

[madshi]

Also in wich format do I have to decode Dolby TrueHD and wich commands to use (with best quality)?
That depends on a lot of things. E.g. which way will you play the movie? How is the device which will play the movie connected to your receiver etc...

[Joniii]

That depends on a lot of things. E.g. which way will you play the movie? How is the device which will play the movie connected to your receiver etc...

I'm playing it with WMP11/Vista Media Center, .MKV files, computer connected to receiver with spdif.

[nautilus7]

I'm playing it with WMP11/Vista Media Center, .MKV files, computer connected to receiver with spdif.

spdif is able to carry ac3 and dts sound.

[madshi]

I'm playing it with WMP11/Vista Media Center, .MKV files, computer connected to receiver with spdif.
Well, you cannot transport E-AC3, TrueHD or FLAC over spdif. So your best option would be to transcode to either AC3 or DTS because those (as nautilus7 posted) are the only multi channel formats usually supported by spdif. Of course if you want to keep the best audio quality for the future when maybe you'll playback movies through HDMI, you might want to store the TrueHD track for future use. Of course that's your decision.

[Joniii]

Thanks for the info. I guess DTS would have the best quality then.

so, eac3to audio.thd audio...

Thats as much as I can figure out wich would be the best quality, there is so many options to choose :confused:.

[madshi]

Thanks for the info. I guess DTS would have the best quality then.

so, eac3to audio.thd audio...

Thats as much as I can figure out wich would be the best quality, there is so many options to choose :confused:.
eac3to audio.thd audio.dts

It's not that difficult, or is it? ;) However, this works only if you have the commercial Surcode DTS encoder installed on your PC. If you don't then your only choice is AC3 encoding. Which would be:

eac3to audio.thd audio.ac3

[Joniii]

eac3to audio.thd audio.dts

It's not that difficult, or is it? ;) However, this works only if you have the commercial Surcode DTS encoder installed on your PC. If you don't then your only choice is AC3 encoding. Which would be:

eac3to audio.thd audio.ac3

lol. DTS, DTS-ES, DTS-96/24, DTS-HD Hi-Res, DTS-HD Master Audio, these confused me. I thought I need to pick one of these and all of them would have different extension and so on.

Ok, I think I get it now :).

[Joniii]

Oh, one more thing about these bitrates. THD->DTS would be best to do with 1536kbps, am I totally wrong about this?

[madshi]

Oh, one more thing about these bitrates. THD->DTS would be best to do with 1536kbps, am I totally wrong about this?
Generally with lossy codecs (like AC3, E-AC3 and conventional DTS) the rule is that the higher the bitrate the higher is the quality. So yes, 1536kbps would give the best audio quality. Of course it also consumes the most space.

[Joniii]

Generally with lossy codecs (like AC3, E-AC3 and conventional DTS) the rule is that the higher the bitrate the higher is the quality. So yes, 1536kbps would give the best audio quality. Of course it also consumes the most space.

Works beautifully, Surcode is now encoding. Thx for this great tool.

[Joniii]

One more question does this create 24-bit DTS or 16-bit?

[Jaja1]

Do those movies happen to be something other than 1920x1080p24? The Haali splitter has some trouble with strange aspect ratios. Those are really rare, though. Currently eac3to uses Haali's splitter + Haali's MKV muxer to create MKV files. Because of that I'm at the mercy of the Haali filters. If there's a bug in the Haali filters, there's not much I can do about it.It happens to all sorts of titles, all 1920x1080p24. The Graduate, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, Unforgiven etc. The mkv versions have the same problems as the originals. So if you use Haali's splitter, which is buggy for VC1 encoded HD DVD's, in eac3to, I guess it's of no use to turn the evo's into mkv's. Pitty.

[madshi]

One more question does this create 24-bit DTS or 16-bit?
DTS always *decodes* to 24bit. However, you can feed the DTS encoder 16bit or 24bit. Both is accepted by Surcode. So basically the DTS file is encoded in the bitdepth of the source.

[madshi]

It happens to all sorts of titles, all 1920x1080p24. The Graduate, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, Unforgiven etc. The mkv versions have the same problems as the originals. So if you use Haali's splitter, which is buggy for VC1 encoded HD DVD's, in eac3to, I guess it's of no use to turn the evo's into mkv's. Pitty.
I've remuxed at least 15 VC-1 HD DVDs to MKV without a single problem. So I don't think that there is a general problem with VC-1 HD DVDs. Not sure about those movies you've mentioned. Maybe there's something special about them. Please try reripping to make sure that there's no glitch in the rip. If you have reripped the movies and the same problem still occurs I'd be happy about a sample.

[rickardk]

It happens to all sorts of titles, all 1920x1080p24. The Graduate, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, Unforgiven etc. The mkv versions have the same problems as the originals. So if you use Haali's splitter, which is buggy for VC1 encoded HD DVD's, in eac3to, I guess it's of no use to turn the evo's into mkv's. Pitty.

I have done remuxed about 60 titles now. Very few problems...

Unforgiven remuxed without problems

[madshi]

I have done remuxed about 60 titles now. Very few problems...

Unforgiven remuxed without problems
Thanks.

I think that when eac3to users are having problems the problems are often caused by bad rips. eac3to is quite sensitive to bad rips. Maybe Haali's filters are, too. The ticket to good transcoding/remuxing is a glitch free rip.

[rickardk]

Thanks.

I think that when eac3to users are having problems the problems are often caused by bad rips. eac3to is quite sensitive to bad rips. Maybe Haali's filters are, too. The ticket to good transcoding/remuxing is a glitch free rip.

Yes and that's good that it is sensitive!
But some discs can cause problems due to bad authoring. Often there is a workaround though...

[Chumbo]

I updated to 2.14 and wanted to report this:eac3to "HVDVD_TS\FEATURE_1.EVO"+"HVDVD_TS\FEATURE_2.EVO" 4: movie.dts -84ms

EVO, 1 video track, 4 audio tracks, 2:15:09
1: Joined EVO file
2: h264/AVC, 1080p24 /1.001
3: E-AC3, 5.1 channels, 768kbit/s, 48khz, dialnorm: -27dB, -84ms
4: TrueHD, 5.1 channels, 48khz, dialnorm: -27dB, -84ms
Extracting audio track number 4...
Removing dialog normalization...
Applying RAW/PCM delay...
Writing WAVs...
Creating/writing file "movie.R.wav"...
Creating/writing file "movie.L.wav"...
Creating/writing file "movie.C.wav"...
Creating/writing file "movie.SL.wav"...
Creating/writing file "movie.LFE.wav"...
Creating/writing file "movie.SR.wav"...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[mlp @ 68A4E2E0]End of stream indicated
[mlp @ 68A4E2E0]End of stream indicated
Found Surcode DTS Encoder version 1.0.23.0.
Surcode encoding successfully started. Please wait...
Closing Surcode...
Video track 2 contains 194425 frames.
eac3to processing took 2 hours, 19 minutes.
Surcode encoding took 45 minutes, 59 seconds.
Done.

I'll use -nero to redo it, but thought you might want to know. This process does use libav right? Thanks much.

If I may ask for a couple wish list items:
- command line option to log the screen output to a file. I currently use the redirect to a file, i.e., " > log.txt" but the file has to be "cleaned" out, at least on Windows it does, as it has extraneous dashes, spaces and either CRs or LFs. It would be nice to have a "clean" log file. :)

- add to the logging, if it's not too much trouble, the filter chain being used, or at least what video and/or audio objects are being used when no specific one is specified.

Thanks so much madshi for all you're doing on this behemoth.

[SiC]

Did you use the latest eac3to version to demux audio and video? In that case you shouldn't need to use any delays. eac3to already applies all necessary delays during demuxing.

Thanks, it worked. I used eac3to to strip the audio and it came up with -84ms.
I ended up re-encoding the E-AC3 to AC3 640k since the DTS file size was too large to burn onto a single layer Blu-Ray. I was about 800MB short of space for the DTS :(

[madshi]

I updated to 2.14 and wanted to report this:[mlp @ 68A4E2E0]End of stream indicated
[mlp @ 68A4E2E0]End of stream indicated
[...]
eac3to processing took 2 hours, 19 minutes.
Surcode encoding took 45 minutes, 59 seconds.
Done.
That's ok, everything's fine. This "end of stream indicated" message just means that there was a marker in the TrueHD stream which indicated that the track is through. This is not a bug nor an error. The resulting file should be alright.

If I may ask for a couple wish list items:
- command line option to log the screen output to a file. I currently use the redirect to a file, i.e., " > log.txt" but the file has to be "cleaned" out, at least on Windows it does, as it has extraneous dashes, spaces and either CRs or LFs. It would be nice to have a "clean" log file. :)
There is a log file written everytime eac3to runs. Just check out "log.txt" in the folder where eac3to is located.

- add to the logging, if it's not too much trouble, the filter chain being used, or at least what video and/or audio objects are being used when no specific one is specified.
I don't see why that should be necessary? The default decoders are listed in the first post of this thread. These are the decoders that are used if you don't force the use of another decoder.

Filter chain? DirectShow is not even involved with a lot of eac3to actions. Only when decoding with Nero or Sonic or when remuxing video to MKV DirectShow is used. For everything else DirectShow is not used at all. So the "filter chain" is usually extremely short. For audio decoding with Nero/Sonic it contains two internal filters (special source filter + dump filter, both of which are only available to eac3to) and the Nero/Sonic decoder filter. Nothing more. For Haali remuxing, eac3to is using "Haali Media Splitter (AR) -> Haali Matroska Muxer". There are no more DirectShow filters that are ever used by eac3to.

[Wackyphill]

I have a noob question. I'm trying to backup an HDDVD I have to an MKV file w/ the video and its DolbyTrue HD track converted to FLAC.

Is this supposed to be done in 2 steps?
Like: eac3to 1.evo+2.evo 2: video.mkv
and then run eac3to again to extract the audio
and then finally use mkmerge to add the flac file to the video.mkv


or is there a way to do this in one step? I haven't been able to work it out and get the audio to sync right.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Geleodor]

madshi thank you for the Greatest tool :)
And question: is it possible to make support .m2ts and .ts remuxing, reencoding audio like you did with .EVO ?

[nautilus7]

I have a noob question. I'm trying to backup an HDDVD I have to an MKV file w/ the video and its DolbyTrue HD track converted to FLAC.

Is this supposed to be done in 2 steps?
Like: eac3to 1.evo+2.evo 2: video.mkv
and then run eac3to again to extract the audio
and then finally use mkmerge to add the flac file to the video.mkv


or is there a way to do this in one step? I haven't been able to work it out and get the audio to sync right.

Any help would be appreciated.

You can do it as you said (3 steps) but it can be done in 2 steps also.

Suppose 2 is the video stream and 3 is the truehd strem:

eac3to 1.evo+2.evo 2: video.mkv 3: audio.flac

Then use mkvtoolnix to mux both video and audio in a new file.

[nautilus7]

madshi thank you for the Greatest tool :)
And question: is it possible to make support .m2ts and .ts remuxing, reencoding audio like you did with .EVO ?madshi has already said that he will add support for that in the future.
evo --> mkv has to be perfect, first.

[Chumbo]

That's ok, everything's fine. This "end of stream indicated" message just means that there was a marker in the TrueHD stream which indicated that the track is through. This is not a bug nor an error. The resulting file should be alright.


There is a log file written everytime eac3to runs. Just check out "log.txt" in the folder where eac3to is located.


I don't see why that should be necessary? The default decoders are listed in the first post of this thread. These are the decoders that are used if you don't force the use of another decoder.

Filter chain? DirectShow is not even involved with a lot of eac3to actions. Only when decoding with Nero or Sonic or when remuxing video to MKV DirectShow is used. For everything else DirectShow is not used at all. So the "filter chain" is usually extremely short. For audio decoding with Nero/Sonic it contains two internal filters (special source filter + dump filter, both of which are only available to eac3to) and the Nero/Sonic decoder filter. Nothing more. For Haali remuxing, eac3to is using "Haali Media Splitter (AR) -> Haali Matroska Muxer". There are no more DirectShow filters that are ever used by eac3to.
Thanks a lot madshi. I'm sorry, I didn't mean for the 2nd request to be a hassle. I think I should have clarified it and not use the term "filter chain." I like how you show the audio encoder, for example, when we force the option to -nero. That's all I meant, is when we just use the default, could you show it like you do when we use a forced option? Not a big deal and you're right, I already know what the defaults are. ;)

[Joniii]

I did TrueHD 24bit -> FLAC with this:

eac3to 1.thd 1.flac

It outputted only 16bit FLAC, shouldn't it be 24bit?

[nautilus7]

I did TrueHD 24bit -> FLAC with this:

eac3to 1.thd 1.flac

It outputted only 16bit FLAC, shouldn't it be 24bit?
No.
TrueHD is always 24 bit, but it doesn't mean that contains 24bit of information. It is possible that the "useful" bits are 16 or 20 and the rest are zeros.

[Joniii]

Ok, thx :)

[DreckSoft]

There seems to be a problem with DTS-HD MasterAudio files.

First I tried to extract the core using
eac3to.exe HS.dtshd HS.dts

The resulting file was exactly the same as the source (over 4GB for less than 2h). Extracting with DTSCore worked.

Reencoding doesnt work either:

eac3to.exe HS.dtshd HS.768.dts -768
DTS Master Audio, 7.1 channels, 24 bits, 48khz
Decoding with DirectShow (Sonic Audio Decoder)...
DirectShow reports 5.1 channels, 24 bits, 48khz
Writing WAVs...

Then nothing happens.

I tried the Track from Hairspray US Blu-Ray.


eac3to.exe -test
Nero Audio Decoder (Nero 7 or older) is not working correctly
Sonic Audio Decoder (4.2.0.102) works fine
Haali Media Splitter (2007-11-18) is installed
Surcode DTS Encoder (1.0.23.0) is installed
MkvToolnix (v2.1.0) is installed

eac3to.exe
eac3to v2.14, freeware by madshi.net

[nautilus7]

To extract the core you have to use the -core switch. This has been changed since v2.00 i think.

So, you can't encode to .dts. Maybe a problem with surcode? Try source.dtshd dest.wavs works for you to see if there's a problem with eac3to.

[Wackyphill]

Thank you for the info Nautilus7.

[DreckSoft]

eac3to.exe HS.dtshd HS.dts -core
works, thanks

However
eac3to.exe HS.dtshd HS.dts
should either reencode to dts or do nothing an throw an error. just copying the file seems strange.

My Surcode installation is fine. When I use the dts core and try to reencode everything is fine. Reencoding the dtshd file to flac doesn't work either.

eac3to.exe HS.dtshd HS.flac
DTS Master Audio, 7.1 channels, 24 bits, 48khz
Decoding with DirectShow (Sonic Audio Decoder)...
DirectShow reports 5.1 channels, 24 bits, 48khz
Encoding FLAC...

and nothing else happens. No flac file is created. Encoding the dts core works (but doesn't make sense)

[nautilus7]

Then the problem is at the sonic decoder. Try the -nero swich to see if it works.

[Wackyphill]

Well,I've been able to get audio and video playing in an mkv which is wonderful.

But the audio is a couple seconds or so ahead of the video.

Does anyone know where I went wrong or how to correct the synching?

[nautilus7]

Can you post the command line you used?

[Wackyphill]

F:\HDDVD\300\demux\eac3to\eac3to.exe F:\HDDVD\300\demux\feature_300NDOM6LF1VC1_HD1.EVO+F:\HDDVD\300\demux\feature_300NDOM6LF1VC1_HD1_Divide.EVO 5: F:\HDDVD\300\demux\1.flac

for the audio

F:\HDDVD\300\demux\eac3to\eac3to.exe F:\HDDVD\300\demux\feature_300NDOM6LF1VC1_HD1.EVO+F:\HDDVD\300\demux\feature_300NDOM6LF1VC1_HD1_Divide.EVO 1.mkv

for the video

then I used mkvmerge and justadded in 1.flac to 1.mkv

[nautilus7]

Sorry, i meant the log too. If you don't have it, can you type eac3to 1st.evo+2nd.evo to get the track list in order to see what is the delay value that eac3to reports?

[intomed]

Long time lurker, new poster. Sorry if this has been addressed, as I'm still working my way through all 120+ pages of this thread. However, I have been unable to get a clean video demux from the POTO HD DVD. I have ripped and re-ripped this movie with no success. The audio comes out wonderfully. However, the video is severely unwatchable with, for lack of a better term, rainbow blocks. I've used eac3to without success. I've also tried to go the way of EvoDemux-->VC1 file-->VC12AVI. Even the AVI files demonstrates the same rainbow blocking. The weird thing is that the VC1 and EVO files do not exhibit this behavior. Any help/advise would be greatly appreciated.

Finally, I want to commend the author/creator of eac3to. What a wonderful piece of software. I have used it to create an mkv of Batman Begins without any difficulties. That in itself is a great accomplishment, as that was the first movie I have ever "converted" to another format. Thank you.

[Wackyphill]

is this what you mean by the log?

eac3to v2.14
F:\HDDVD\300\demux\eac3to\eac3to.exe F:\HDDVD\300\demux\feature_300NDOM6LF1VC1_HD1.EVO+F:\HDDVD\300\demux\feature_300NDOM6LF1VC1_HD1_Divide.EVO 5: F:\HDDVD\300\demux\1.flac
EVO, 2 video tracks, 5 audio tracks, 1:56:33
1: Joined EVO file
2: VC-1, 1080p24 /1.001
3: VC-1, 480p30 /1.001
4: E-AC3, 5.1 channels, 640kbit/s, 48khz, dialnorm: -27dB
5: TrueHD, 5.1 channels, 48khz, dialnorm: -27dB
6: E-AC3, 5.1 channels, 640kbit/s, 48khz, dialnorm: -27dB
7: E-AC3, 5.1 channels, 640kbit/s, 48khz, dialnorm: -27dB
8: E-AC3, 2.0 channels, 192kbit/s, 48khz, dialnorm: -27dB
Extracting audio track number 5...
Removing dialog normalization...
Encoding FLAC...
Creating/writing file "F:\HDDVD\300\demux\1.24bit.flac"...
This audio track contains only 16 bit of information.
The zero bytes were successfully removed.
Video track 2 contains 167654 frames.
Video track 3 contains 209566 frames.
eac3to processing took 1 hour, 44 minutes.
Done.

[nautilus7]

Yes. The truehd track doesn't need any delay, so eac3to didn't apply any to the flac. But it should be in sync.

Is the original evo file in sync?
If yes, do you notice the same de-sync throughout the remuxed (mkv) movie? Try using different audio/video decoders to see if the de-sync still exists.

[nautilus7]

Long time lurker, new poster. Sorry if this has been addressed, as I'm still working my way through all 120+ pages of this thread. However, I have been unable to get a clean video demux from the POTO HD DVD. I have ripped and re-ripped this movie with no success. The audio comes out wonderfully. However, the video is severely unwatchable with, for lack of a better term, rainbow blocks. I've used eac3to without success. I've also tried to go the way of EvoDemux-->VC1 file-->VC12AVI. Even the AVI files demonstrates the same rainbow blocking. The weird thing is that the VC1 and EVO files do not exhibit this behavior. Any help/advise would be greatly appreciated.

Finally, I want to commend the author/creator of eac3to. What a wonderful piece of software. I have used it to create an mkv of Batman Begins without any difficulties. That in itself is a great accomplishment, as that was the first movie I have ever "converted" to another format. Thank you.Someone mentioned this kind of problem with this movie a few pages back. Do the evo files playback flawlessly? What decoder do you use?

[intomed]

Yes the evo files playback flawlessly, both the original evo rips and the joined.evo file. Also, when I demux the evo to VC1 with EvoDemux, that file plays back flawlessly. I used the latest version of AnyDVDHD.

[rickardk]

I also had problem with this on U-571. EVOs plays fine.. But as soon as remuxed the video is screwed up.

[intomed]

Doing a search through this thread to see if it's the same problem that I have.

[nautilus7]

I used the latest version of AnyDVDHD.I meant what program you use to playback the file. Not to decrypt them.

Anyway, it might be a haali media splitter bug or mkvtoolix bug.
You can manually mux the raw vc-1 stream to mkv with mkvtoolnix to see what happens.

[intomed]

For the evo files I used media player classic and PDVD. For the VC1 file, I believe I used MPC too. I used MPC for playback of mkv files, as I do not get smooth video playback with VLC (it looks slightly choppy to me). None of these play in WMP11 at all. Don't know how to get the codec to work. As I understand it, isn't WMP supposed to come with the codec to play VC1 files?

I did find a previous post regarding problems with POTO. I found the sample file that was given to Madshi to demonstrate the problem. The problem is...I downloaded the file and it plays flawlessly on MPC and WMP11. I don't see what that person was concerned with. My files for this movie are clean for the Warner Bros emblem, then on the next scene-->rainbow blocks.

[Snowknight26]

Yes the evo files playback flawlessly, both the original evo rips and the joined.evo file. Also, when I demux the evo to VC1 with EvoDemux, that file plays back flawlessly. I used the latest version of AnyDVDHD.

Its a known problem with that HD DVD. Infact, it has several problems throughout the film.

You can manually mux the raw vc-1 stream to mkv with mkvtoolnix to see what happens.
Rainbow frames galore.

[intomed]

So...has anyone found a solution? Or is this a futile effort?