Digital surround encoding

[sumpm1]

Hi,
As long as I have been ripping movies I always went for a one cd rip, so all of you that go for 2 or 3 cd rips understand this. I was wondering if there would be any way to encode all of the the channels of ac3 to mp3 and then trick a 5.1 card into thinking it is ac3 to output digital to a dts receiver.(So the stereo thought the souce was ac3) I thought of this after I saw how good the mp3pro codec worked ( not the best for music, but great compression when you need small audio files for movies) If anyone has any comments, I am not a developer or anything, but I would sure like a program that could do this and it would also let you adjust the volumes of each channel in regular stereo output so it would benefit everyone(including the people that do 2 or 3 cd rips)

[Snike42]

The only way to compress an ac3 stream and keeping the 5.1 channels is by re-encoding it to a new ac3 at a lower bitrate (eg with Sonic Soft Encode). You can't use mp3 and have 5.1 channels.

But if you care about good quality sound, I would recommend using 2 cds and keep the original ac3.

Snike42

[chris25fr]

soon, it will be possible to do and listen ogg vorbis 5.1 . To do is possible .Listen not yet . but soon,it will be good.

[sumpm1]

Snike,
maybe the ac3 can be re encoded from the mp3s in realtime while you watch the movie, so you dont have to use 2 cds. This is what I originally meant bytricking the sound card and or receiver into thinking the stream is ac3

[Acaila]

That would be nice, but a filter can't decode two seperate channels from a single channel. There is no way to tell which sound belonged to which channel before the downmix to MP3.
If each block of sound has the info to be able to seperate channels for playback in addition to the actual sounds, then the entire file would be just as big as an AC3 :)

[Taric25]

If you're going to do a 1 CD rip, just decode your AC3 to PCM and re-encode it at a lower bitrate. This is better and higher quality than AC3 >MP3. At the moment, I know of no way to encode multichannel MP3.

[dragoman]

Hi,

I suppose, theoretically, it would be possible to make multi-channel mp3's if you could:

1) Seperate the 5 different sound channels in an ac3 into 5 distinct files on your computer

2) Encode seperately each of the 5 sound channels into mp3

3) Seamlessly mux all 5 channels into one mp3 file which is then muxed to the video

Voila! 5 channel mp3 sound!!

Now someone has to do it....

dragoman