what about ac3 transcoder ?

[ninjaw]

I'd love to have the option for transcoding 5.1 AC3 from 448 to 224, there's MsDos tools that are doing it great.
448 is the max, everybody are now using it

[ron spencer]

because those tools are not official AC-3 encoders. While they may work in 99% of the cases some players will cough (like my old toshiba), so I doubt lenox wants to hear complaints about some stream not being played...transcoding to MP3 will work because MP3 is ubiquotous.

Now, what may be useful is to have 5.1 conmverted to 2 channel WAV...then you could demux and re-encode teh audio via a real TMPG AC-3 encoder to whatever bit rate you want.

However, WAV output would affect video compression.....

[ninjaw]

I remixed some tunes in 5.1 ... believe me nothing is better than these tools, the sony shit is the worst encoder I never saw.

Why the hell do you want to transcode 5.1 to 2.0 every tools in the world are doing that...

[ron spencer]

to save space....if one has a basement as a secondary room then space is at a premium....thus 5.1 is not needed....so why not get rid of it ? I have a media server and this works perfectly.....that is the "hell"


and also...the tools are not called "MsDos"

[ninjaw]

Yeah right, back to my question plz

[Wolfman]

If you live in as a basement as Home (not even secondary room) !! But I too would like the option to downgrade 5.1 surround sound @ 448 to either 5.1 @224 or even 2.0 @ 192. Admittedly this is less important than it was years ago as space is now less of a premium. More options are better tho.

[ron spencer]

I would much rather have the video quality....you are compressing it alot with xvid anyway, so why BS around it by having alot of 5.1 ? If I want 5.1 I put it on my main set....I never watch Xvid on main set....if I am gonna recompress then I want the best video, and if I am watching it in my secondary room that is what I want. I think cutting bitrate of AC-3 to non-standard rates (5.1 448 is dvd spec...nothing else is for 5.1) then your player may not play it.....waste of time.

[ninjaw]

I would much rather have the video quality....you are compressing it alot with xvid anyway, so why BS around it by having alot of 5.1 ? If I want 5.1 I put it on my main set....I never watch Xvid on main set....if I am gonna recompress then I want the best video, and if I am watching it in my secondary room that is what I want. I think cutting bitrate of AC-3 to non-standard rates (5.1 448 is dvd spec...nothing else is for 5.1) then your player may not play it.....waste of time.

Yeah right, i'd like to see some player refusing to play 224, especially digital data sent to the audio decoder.
Very usefull arguments, thx for sharing. So you dont need this feature because you got 2 rooms, great for you.

[ron spencer]

toshiba 4800 will not play 224, of course this is BeSweet AC-3...neither does my phillips, but these are old.

My point is if you have one room there is no need to use xvid....just store your dvds or what have you. If I only had one room to play my stuff in then I would not even touch xvid...no point as all dvds in front of me.

My opinion is that stuff like this is for quick and easy file server stuff....which likely means who cares for audio but video most important....but whatever floats your boat. I just do not see the purpose of only having the bitrate of ac-3....it will save you minimal space vis-a-vis video....

again this is just me....