AC3 2 channels 448kbps = waste of bits?

[kypec]

Recently I found on one of my commercial DVDs that audio stream (all three languages available EN/CZ/SK) is encoded as DD 2.0 with insane bitrate 448kbps. Is it normal or were the authoring guys complete nuts? I can provide a sample if anyone's interested but MediaInfo & foobar2000 both agree that it's only stereo...

[Skelsgard]

The guys involved probably didn't have much idea about what they were doing.
Most DVDs, if not all, have their 2.0 tracks at 192. 224kbps to be safe would have been enough to get a good quality encode. Even MP2 sounds ok at 224kbps.

448kbps is just insane. And 3 tracks at those bitrates?
That's just overkill for the sake of overkill.
I guess their boss doesn't mind if his employees do acid on the job... :D :D

[Ghitulescu]

There are several reasons to do this, including the most obvious one of them - the guys simply had no idea how to encode the audio with the tool they used
but
since it's a localised product, it might very well be that they changed the 5.1 secondary languages (FR, DE) with CZ/SK 2.0 from the original image and used a higher bitrate to fill in the space (was it a DVD9?)
I don't think I ever heard of SK/CZ other than 2.0 except for Bathory (2009) because CZ/SK were coproducers.
AFAIK only DE receives the 5.1 "negative" sound ...

[kypec]

Yeah, I'm also inclined to think this is just another example of unexperienced staff producing such low budget DVDs, released as paper-cover only.
Nope, it's not DVD9, full ISO image made with DVD Decrypter is only 3.99GB
BTW, the full title is "Franklin and the turtle lake treasure" PAL R2, edition released for local Czech and Slovak markets.