[Q answered] Given ac3enc issue, it's NOT advised to reencode AC3 to lower bitrate

[Meeple]

[NOTE: my question was answered, and I will NOT be reencoding to a lower bitrate.]

I've been attempting to follow the guide here using AC3Machine to reencode an AC3 file to a lower bitrate (224Kbps), and wanting to learn more, I searched here and read through a number of threads that refer to the ac3enc.dll problem of bad quality or low volume AC3 output files.

The main thing I'm trying to accomplish is keeping the 5.1 channels and relatively high quality for the sound in a movie backup. I was under the impression that the best way to do this was keeping the AC3 format, except I wanted to make the filesize smaller by lowering the bitrate (since 448Kbps was the original bitrate, and I don't really need it that high).

Can any of the experts here please recommend what is an alternative to go about this? Now that I've learned about the problem with ac3enc.dll, I'm not sure using AC3Machine and BeSweet is the solution.

TIA for bearing w/ this newbie question.

[KpeX]

In general, it's not recommended to reencode AC3 - even commercial encoders won't change the fact that transcoding reduces quality. In the age of $0.25 DVD-Rs, reencoding AC3 audio doesn't buy you much space. If you absolutely need to reduce the space, my recommendation would be to transcode to 5.1 AAC or buy one of the surcode products (almost any commercial encoder will have similar quality, they are all based on the dolby libraries AFAIK).

[daphy]

Hiho

an advice which was often posted here is -> try the latest (dec.2004) version of HeadAC (http://www.needfulthings.webhop.org)
- it sounds pretty good using a modded version of ac3enc.dll (which is not compatible to besweet)

remember to click the 'options' twice for getting to the bitrate settings!

-> take a look at
plz report your impressions :rolleyes:

[tigerman8u]

224kbps IMO is low for a good quality AC-3 audio. My self I don't go below 384kbps for 5.1 AC-3. I agree with "ApeX" 's reply.

[Meeple]

Thanks for the replies. I've done some more reading, and decided to just keep the original AC3 bitrate.

I forgot though, I had another problem, and that was my AC3 audio was out of sync with the video, and I thought I'd need to use BeSweet to change the delay value. I need to try some things to fix it. Anyway, I'll post a new thread about the out of sync issue if I still can't figure it out.