So... What's your audio format choice for 1 CD rip ?

[ookzDVD]

Since lots of audio format is supported by Matroska,
what is your audio format choice for 1 CD rip now,
the objective is to give more room to the video,
so the audio size should be smaller BUT still sounds GOOD! :)

Thank you.

PS. I'm still using .ogg, I hope I'm not too far away behind. :(
Btw. Is it now save to use AAC and it's variants ?

[KpeX]

For 1 CD rips:

AAC via Psytel AACenc -normal for relatively small bitrates, 100-120 kbps average on most soundtracks. AAC is a good format for the future and psytel is free and has performed well in listening tests around these bitrates.

If an extremely low bitrate is needed, HE-AAC via Nero, but I use this extremely rarely as audio quality is important to me.

For short, compressible movies, I keep the original AC3 5.1 mix and do an anamorphic video encode using Matroska to enable low video bitrates.

As far as I know AAC is completely safe to use in Matroska.

[ookzDVD]

@KpeX,

AAC, ok. I'm not too far away behind :)

For encoding :
Which tool do you use for that ?
AACMachine with the AACEnc V.215 ?

For decoding ?
Is that CoreACC still ongoing,
what is the latest version anyway ?
If you don't mind, could you provide a "temporary mirror" for me ?

Thank you.

[KpeX]

I use BeSweet to decode AC3 > Wav and Psytel 2.15 to encode Wav > AAC, CLI for both. CoreAAC is the preferred directshow filter, get it at Rarewares (http://rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org/aac.html). hth,

[tiki4]

I still use Ogg Vorbis for low bitrate stereo only soundtracks (as I often keep two languages on one XCD in Matroska container). For 6 channel soundtracks I use Nero HE-AAC with streaming preset which can give quite good quality IMHO. Modern video encoders have become very efficient so one can give audio more space.

tiki4

@KpeX: By the way, latest CoreAAC (newer than the one on RareWares) can always be found in this (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=6428&) thread on HA.

[Tuning]

To me 5.1 HE-AAC is approximately 20-30 percent larger than 128kbps stereo mp3 file.(HE-AAC streaming profile)

[ookzDVD]

@tiki4,

thank you for supporting me :)


@tuning,

thank you for giving me new inspiration to explore the HE-AAC 5.1 :)


@KpeX,

I did try mux short clip divx5 (.avi) with .aac into .mkv,
but I always got the audio is played slower than the video.
PS. I use the mmg for muxing.

[tiki4]

@ookzDVD:

Hehe, it seems I'm still around...

tiki4

[kastro68]

Originally posted by Tuning
To me 5.1 HE-AAC is approximately 20-30 percent larger than 128kbps stereo mp3 file.(HE-AAC streaming profile)

I think you are comparing apples to oranges.

[tiki4]

I think he just talk about bitrates. Anyway, in latest Nero 6.0.0.23 the streaming profile is producing higher bitrates: ~200 kBit.

[Tuning]

@kastro68,
I was only tring to remind he-aac is good for archieving sound and its(VBR-streaming profile in 60011 nero dll) 20-30% larger in size than 128kbps CBR lame file.Nothing related to quality.But if you notice the quality of stereo mp3 with stereo he-aac is comparable @ streaming profile.And because of use of M/S Matrixing(Mid/side matrixing--similar to joint stereo) 5.1 He-aac file will be only little greater in size than stereo 128kbps CBR counter part.Thus from context you can decide what i was comparing.



@Tiki4,
Thanks tiki4,I could not test further.BTW,is 48khz problem solved?
I'm still using good old 60011 plugin.So new dll will be producing much higher sizes.Then it would be comparable to only internet profile.Thanks.

[tiki4]

Menno said, the application has to handle resampling, not the aacenc32.dll. Thus I conclude that this issue wasn't adressed as it isn't a bug. From what Menno said I think BeSweet should automatically resample to 44.1 kHz when 'streaming' profile is selected. But I will test is soon.

tiki4

[Sniffer]

I'm fan of 1CD Rips in Mode2 Format (XCD)

So i use:

Ogg 0 - 64kpbs (if my movie it's too long and i can't reach at least 900kb in video).

QuickTime AAC CBR 128Kpbs (If my movie is about 90 minutes and i have space to improve audio quality).


I would try AAC-HE but as far ias i have read in ChristianJDW report, matroska don't deal well with this format, and he recommend to wait for the new tools version to do it.

[tiki4]

Hm. When did you read that post from Christian? I don't know which version of mkvmerge introduced the new switch --aac-is-sbr but its definitely quite a while now.
Anyway. Matroska deals very well with HE-AAC and if you mux from MP4 container to MKV you don't even need to set that switch as mkvmerge can recognise that from the MP4 container. If you mux an plain HE-AAC file than you have to use that switch to tell mkvmerge.
Decoding is done very well with CoreAAC which links against libfaad2 that was written by Menno Bakker who works for Ahead.

So I don't see any problems that speak against HE-AAC. The transcoding can be done in OagMachine by DSPGuru pretty easily.

tiki4

[yokaze]

Is HE-AAC safe to use long-term wise?

I mean, I know I'm safe as long as I'm just viewing my encodes on a PC. But when the day comes where hardware support for mpeg4/AAC actually becomes common, will there be systems supporting the SBR extensions? I heard the additional processor load for SBR decoding is pretty significant.

(I know using mkv/ogm might not be a good idea portability-wise, but it's far easier to remux my files than reencode from scratch)

[Tuning]

Originally posted by yokaze
Is HE-AAC safe to use long-term wise?

I mean, I know I'm safe as long as I'm just viewing my encodes on a PC. But when the day comes where hardware support for mpeg4/AAC actually becomes common, will there be systems supporting the SBR extensions? I heard the additional processor load for SBR decoding is pretty significant.

(I know using mkv/ogm might not be a good idea portability-wise, but it's far easier to remux my files than reencode from scratch)

ChristianHJW told once in H/W players poll about the same.I think its difficult to implement/decode HE-AAC in Standalone players.But for PC-viewing I would go for it.

BTW,LC-AAC will not require high processing power to decode.So in near future,we can find a LC-AAC decodable H/W player.

[tiki4]

HE-AAC is part of the MPEG4 standard in the meantime and quite a few radio stations transmit in AAC+ (= HE-AAC). So I'd expect consumer devices supporing that format in the not so distant future. About portability, I don't know. There's no DVD player that can deal with MP4 container yet, but maybe some day. If you think of hardware based playback you shouldn't only avoid HE-AAC but maybe AAC at all. Current players only support Simple Profile MPEG4 video with MP3 audio in AVI container. So usually no GMC, no QPel and other stuff. Actually I don't care about that. If you want hardware playback I think your best bet is still MPEG2 on DVD which will be around quite some time.

tiki4

[Sniffer]

This is the one i have read

ChristianHJW
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT !!!!

DONT USE HE-AAC IN MKV FILES UNTIL WE COULD UPDATE THE TOOLS !!!!


It was decided today that, different to first opinions, it will be necessary to tag HE-AAC audio tracks in matroska files separately. This became necessary due to a specific 'feature' of M$ DirectShow, still the most used playback platform for all kinds of media files, but mainly for video files.

DirectShow requires that the actual output sampling rate of an audio track is known before building/creating the playback graph. Unfortunately, a HE-AAC ( AAC SBR ) track is marked as half sampling rate only, to allow playback on non-SBR capable decoders/players. The track will be played, but with high frequency information being completey cut off, as the SBR info in the track will be skipped.

For DirectShow playback of matroska files this is giving us a lot of problems, because you actually learn if an AAC track is SBR or not, once you have decoded the first channel element ( IIRC from what menno told us ). This is impossible to do before you have actually built the playback graph, and then with an already incorrect sampling rate, preventing you from using the high frequency sound information. A possible workaround here is to assume all AAC is HE-AAC, and to set output sampling rate from the parser filter always by factor 2 higher ( if its set as 22.050 KHz, you output 44.1 KHz ). Once you decoded the first element, and you find its NOT SBR AAC, you then have to artificially upsample the output sampling rate. While this is a good solution at first sight, it will turn into a major problem if in future 96 KHz input was feed into HE AAC encoders, resulting in a 48 KHz sampling rate reported in the AAC header. In this case you will also have to double the sampling rate always, up to 96 KHz, and thus leave the files unplayable on most systems when soundcards dont support this input sampling rates, or again all the SBR information was lost during playback.

For this reason, we decided to NOT follow menno's recommendation for using the same codec ID for all AAC tracks, and leave SBR detection to the decoder, but now we will try to find out for every track if it actually contains SBR or not. To indicate in the MKV file that AAC is SBR, we will add a new EBML element called KaxOutputSamplingRate , and this will become a mandatory element to read before building DirectShow graphs ( it can be used the very same with MP3Pro and other, future SBR implementations ). To find out about SBR we have 2 ways :

1. If AAC is coming from MP4 container, its easy, as there are 5 bytes in the mp4 AudioSpecificConfig element that will tell us

2. If source is an AAC track, we will allow the user to set the HE AAC flag manually, or scan the file for SBR specific patterns in the bitstream

Conclusion :

There will be a new way to use HE-AAC in matroska, please dont create those files with released tools now !


This is from 05/08/2003....i don't know of any change so far.

[KpeX]

@sniffer

That post is dated. As tiki told you the SBR switch has been in MKVmerge for some time now. Please do not mislead users with false information unless you do some research first.

[Sniffer]

1 - first, i don't put a false information, i put the date of the post i read, and it wasn't my intention to give any false information, the post is from 5/08/2003 and i didn't knew that sbr solve the problem out.

2 - yes i have research, but the only valid information it was this one that i got.

3 - In the post you can read, i'm not shure if anything change by now.

Thanks for your info, on this outdated information.


Best Regards
Sniff

[tiki4]

Please take a look here (http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/doc/ChangeLog). It seems to be 0.6.3 was the first version to support that switch.

tiki4

[filewalker]

Hi guys,

...3 weeks after the last post in this thread, I thought that it would be interesting again which experience with AAC and Nero's presets/options you have been collected in the meantime.:)

So which options/profiles do you like most for 1CD rips in Nero...

Cu filewalker