Rip PCM from DVD ?

[mdjaved]

Hi! I didnt know where to put this topic so I added it here. I was just wondering if there is any way of ripping the raw pcm data from the dvd? Since AC3 and DTS are both lossy, I was thinking if I could get the raw pcm, I could encode it to aac rather than transcoding and losing information in the process. I read on wikipedia that DVD videos should have mandatory pcm on it. DVDDecryptor doesnt recognise the PCM tracks it seems. Or maybe I may have the wrong settings. Anybody got any ideas on this ?

J

[Blue_MiSfit]

Well, when you say that "DVD videos should have mandatory PCM on it" - you are confused.

The DVD standard mandates that PCM is an accepted audio format, and that all players must be capable of decoding it.

This doesn't necessarily mean that most DVDs will have a raw PCM stream. The vast majority of them have AC-3 (Dolby Digital), or DTS (or both). Some DVDs do have PCM, but IIRC, it's 2ch at best. I don't think 5.1ch PCM is supported by the DVD-Video standard.

DVD-Audio on the other hand does support 5.1ch PCM, and at 24bit 96KHz as a matter of fact (which sounds just lovely :))

Your best bet is to just grab whatever audio track is in your preferred language and channel configuration. DTS or AC3, it doesn't really matter much if you're going to transcode to AAC. I wouldn't recommend transcoding AC3, as it won't save much bitrate, and the results can be very lossy to good ears on decent equipment.

DTS -> AAC on the other hand is very practical, as the high bitrate (~1.5mbit) of DTS makes storing it in a DVD backup somewhat difficult in most instances. I have never personally done it, and IIRC it involves more hoop-jumping than AC3->AAC.

Good luck :)

~MiSfit

[mdjaved]

Thanks for the reply misfit. I was interested in the 5.1 PCM but like you said, probably its not part of that standard so it would be a waste of time. I havent got any DVD-Audio to test out yet but when i do i'll try that :). But for the meantime i'm concentrating on movies only. And i was considering transcoding to 256 AAC-LC (takes about an hour using meGUI and Nero for a 2 hr ac3 file).

As for DTS, apparently meGUI gives some weird error msg so i dont know what to do there. I did read that foobar could be used but i havent tried it myself. Wished they included support for DTS in meGUI. That would be good.

BTW can you suggest any good program for telling info about files. I ripped the movie to my HDD using DVDDecryptor and i tried playing it via The KMPlayer and it shows the movie as 1h7m when the actual length is 2h8m. I even tried using Media Info, it too shows 1h7m. Any suggestions ?