aac or ac3 with x264 encodes?

[Carpo]

im not asking which is best just which do people use - i am going to be backing up my dvds soon and putting them up in the attic so will have all the encodes on a NAS setup, space is not an issue so i am thinking (seeing as i have a large screen) to keep them at the default 720x576 screen size and make them all around 2gb - yes im a quality whore, i could even make them bigger, but which would people suggest for the audio?

[Southstorm]

I like to keep the original AC3/DTS audio since my 5.1 receiver handles the decoding. AAC isn't supported by my hardware yet...

[Carpo]

yes mine goes out to a ac3/dts decoder from the on board HD card through optical

[chainring]

AC3 and mp4 in an mkv, here. Playing from a Mac Mini to a Yamaha DSP-A1 via Toslink.

[bond]

has nothing to do with guis. read the f announcement

moved

[Carpo]

nice attitude - and maybe if you hadn't been so fast to move it, i could have added to this post about the x264 profiles people use with the audio they chose but i guess i will have to make another thread about that now :p

[streaming machines]

Currently most of the hardware HD players supports AC3 audio with H.264 video and MPEG2 TS multiplexer. The software players like window media player can support most of the combination. It does not matter which audio compression format you use if you have that codec directshow filter installed in your system. To play on hardware HD players you are bound to use AC3.

[Southstorm]

It does matter if you want to stream the original audio to your audio receiver and let it decode natively. The more transcoding that goes on in the computer, the lower the quality.

[Blue_MiSfit]

The more transcoding that goes on in the computer, the lower the quality.


Not necessarily. Your computer can software decode AC3/EAC3/DTS to WAV just as well as the hardware decoder can. The only difference is the transport. Keeping the audio in AC3 / EAC3 at under 1.5mbps maintains compatibility with S/PDIF, which can't go any faster. Silly they designed a digital audio interface around 2ch PCM, and gave that a fibre optic / shielded coax cable. I bet you could stuff so much more data down those pipes...

Oh well :D I always mux the original audio track in for the record. It's just easier...

AC3 also has the advantage of maintaining DRC metadata, so you can adjust the dynamics on the fly - very useful when you're in a noisy environment and need to compress the hell out of things.... or when you're at the home theater with a good audio kit that can handle the full dynamic range. AC3 is pretty cool that way!

~MiSfit