SoftEncode - Dolby surround or not?

[Boulder]

Hi all,

I do a lot of analogue video capturing. My PVR-250 encodes the audio to MP2 (stereo, 384kbps) which I encode to WAV with MADPlay and then feed the WAV (after denoising and normalizing) to SoftEncode and encode to AC3.

My question is, should I ever use the "Dolby Surround encoded" flag? I know that some of the captured programs/movies have DS sound originally but is that information lost in the capturing process? I've used the flag on some encodes where the audio track has sounded very much surround-like.

[ursamtl]

Hi Boulder,

As I understand it, you should in fact use the Dolby Surround encoded flag if you're encoding material that was encoded with Dolby Surround. This only works in SoftEncode's 2.0 mode, but it is the right way to encode such material. I don't think you're capture/transfer process will remove the DS encoding since it's designed to be carried on two channels.

Regards,
Steve.