Should I convert TrueHD and DTS-HD MA movie soundtracks to FLAC?

[marcusj0015]

Flac is open and has MANY codecs, and I plan on streaming my movies to my Xbox/Watching them on my Laptop, FLAC has better compression is is still lossless, and It's MUCH easier to get flacs to play than those cumbersome formats for free. should I or shouldn't i? and if I do, how do I go about doing it?

[Atak_Snajpera]

indeed flac offers better compression mainly due to lack of embended ac3/dts track. if you want to increase compression even further convert track from 24bit to 16bit. you can do that using eac3to.

[marcusj0015]

Eh, I want to keep it 24 bit but thanks for the suggestion. I am however having a problem with FLAC, both on Windows and Ubuntu (which is running in a virtual machine) I had read that there was a 2GB file size limit in windows due to the way it was compiled on Windows, so I used Ubuntu to alleviate the problem, but I'm getting the same damn error there as well. the error message is "FLAC__STREAM_ENCODER_CLIENT_ERROR" and I don't have a clue what to do. I'm trying to recompress the flac eac2to outputs for better compression, and I'm using " -8 -e -p --force" options which yeah, it's computationally expensive, but I'm only going to encode it once, might as well get the best possible compression. Do you have any ideas or suggestions? I'm using Win 7 SP1 x64 and Ubuntu 12.04 x64

I've tried rewriting the audio file, and I've tried outputting a new file as well, same problem both times.

Oh, one more thing, when I check the file with Flac, it test's and says that it's just fine.

[Atak_Snajpera]

Eh, I want to keep it 24 bit but thanks for the suggestion.
I guess You like placebo effect then :)

I use eac3to in ripbot264 and it works like a charm. (DTS-MA/TrueHD to .flac)

[marcusj0015]

Yeah, I was reading about that, it's becasue it bypasses Flac's IO something or other, whic is still 32 bit blah blah blah, and it keeps it from writing files over 2GB somehow, I tried finding an x64 copy, and it actually worked, but there wasn't ANY file saving, which surprised me, so I'm starting to think that I made a mistake somewhere. does anyone know the switches Eac3to uses with flac as an output?

[Atak_Snajpera]

does anyone know the switches Eac3to uses with flac as an output?
eac3to has help.
Open console and execute eac3to.exe.

[marcusj0015]

eac3to has help.
Open console and execute eac3to.exe.

Yeah, but it's just a reprint of everything that's on the eac3to website.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Eac3to/How_to_Use

[SassBot]

You can always ask madshi in the eac3to thread in the Audio section.

[marcusj0015]

I don't even know why I didn't think of that. :/

[Sivar]

indeed flac offers better compression mainly due to lack of embended ac3/dts track. if you want to increase compression even further convert track from 24bit to 16bit. you can do that using eac3to.

I know this is a slightly old thread, but I thought I'd chime in for future readers.

I have encoded hundreds of videos and use FLAC for the output. FLAC is often much smaller not only because of the lack of an embedded lossy track, but also because it handles multiple channels intelligently.

I really would take Atak_Snajpera's suggestion and encode them in 16-bit.

You know how some people say, "you can't tell the difference between a good lossy track and lossless?" Well, they are right, but I still prefer lossless. 16-bit is still lossless.
Let me repeat: You lose exactly no fidelity downmixing to 16-bit.
Please read http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html for further information.

[nevcairiel]

If your source is 24-bit and you encode it to 16-bit, its no longer lossless. You lose 8-bit of data.
If that data made any real-world difference? Maybe not. But its the same argument as with a good lossy encode, if you can't hear a difference, you could call it "audibly lossless", but you still lose some data. You may not lose fidelity, but there is still data lost.

This is all just semantics, but if you don't count a very good lossy encode as "lossless" just because the codec is "lossy", then you really can't count a 24 bit -> 16-bit encode lossless either. Either you base it on the real world differences (ie. what you hear), or you base it on actually reproducing the 100% exact same signal as before, which your 24->16 conversion no longer does.

[Atak_Snajpera]

another way of increasing flac compresion is preprocessing wav with tool called LossyWav.

[Biggiesized]

You're not getting 24 bits worth of signal. There are a couple least significant bits of noise. Converting to 16 bits will you save you bandwidth.

[bmcelvan]

I know this is a slightly old thread, but I thought I'd chime in for future readers.

I have encoded hundreds of videos and use FLAC for the output. FLAC is often much smaller not only because of the lack of an embedded lossy track, but also because it handles multiple channels intelligently.

I really would take Atak_Snajpera's suggestion and encode them in 16-bit.

You know how some people say, "you can't tell the difference between a good lossy track and lossless?" Well, they are right, but I still prefer lossless. 16-bit is still lossless.
Let me repeat: You lose exactly no fidelity downmixing to 16-bit.
Please read http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html for further information.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS LINK!!!

I've been struggling with this for years. I consider myself, if not an audiophile, then a very discriminating audio listener. I'm not sure that I even could be an audiophile anymore being 36 years old and having been to over 100 Phish shows alone, which obviously are loud as hell rock concerts and have probably ruined my ears a bit. However I always listen to music with high end studio monitor headphones and can't stand people who like to listen to "enahanced" audio headphones, saying they sound louder and better...Aghhhh, Bass is just a small component of the sound we can hear. Sorry...enough ranting.

I really have been looking for a reason to keep only 16bit audio...it saves a ton of space, but this link really swayed me. Again, thank you so much. I've listened with HQ headphones to probably 500 phish shows in 16bit FLAC and at least 50 if not 100 in 24bit FLAC and am still not sure if I've ever heard a difference. I'm pretty sure I've "THOUGHT" I've heard differences, but now I'm thinking I haven't.

For those that care I can easily hear a difference between FLAC and MP3192 like night and day, can hear a difference between FLAC and MP3224-256 and usually/occasionally (especially in classical music) hear a difference between FLAC and MP3320, although this one takes a clean room and a clear head.

No more 24bit TrueHD or DTSHDMA. Definitely converting to 16bit 6 or 8 channel FLAC.

Again...THANK YOU FOR THE LINK

[kotuwa]

For those that care I can easily hear a difference between FLAC and MP3192 like night and day, can hear a difference between FLAC and MP3224-256 and usually/occasionally (especially in classical music) hear a difference between FLAC and MP3320...
May be it is MP3.
But still, is the difference is negative? :D

Also can you hear a difference, i mean a negative difference, with high AAC and OPUS etc settings?

Like
Opus 1530kbps (5.1) or
Or AAC 1584kbps (5.1) or
QAAC TVBR 127 or Nero Q=1 ?
:)