Ripping AC3 stream from laserdisc possible?

[oddball]

This has been talked about a little on usenet but nobody seemed to have the technical know how. I was wondering if it is at al possible? Considering that my own laserdisc player outputs AC3 via an RF signal then obviously some kind of RF convertor would be needed. The thing is how would you get that converted digital stream into a computer? There is an SPDIF in for instance on my Sound Blaster Live! card. But how would you get it recorded as a raw signal into an AC3 stream on your hard disk?

The other way would obviously be to split the 5.1 signal to 6 analog outs and somehow get those into the computer, resync them and reencode to AC3 in something like Soundforge DD encoder (Messy).

Am interested in what can be done.

[MaTTeR]

I'm seem to recall a thread discussing this and the use of a software product called Total Recorder, I think. Some of the LD guru's hang out over on the Home Theater forums. (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/) . I tmight be worth browsing, searching or posting your question there.

[oddball]

Thanks. Found the relevant thread. Some dud eis gonna try in a couple of weeks to do it. I think the biggest problem to overcome is trying to get an SPDIF input on a soundcard to capture the AC3 as a raw digital stream to hard disk.

[MaTTeR]

The connection shouldn't be a problem as long as an SPDIF input exists on the card. My Zoltrix sound card has this and apparently can accept 48kHz digital data from something like MD.

Hope you have fast hard drives:D Now that I think about it, the stream would be at the very most 1.5mbps so that shouldn't be an issue for modern drives.

[tom para]

1.5mbps sounds a little excessive. Even for 48kHz, 6 channels, 640kbps is max. This can be found in SoftEncode's 5.1 encode configuration.

[MaTTeR]

I was estimating a worse case scenario with something like a DTS track at max bitrate:)