Removing HD Audio Option

gamecaptor

Hello all,

I am new to playing around with the Blu-ray to Mobile feature (as seen in my previous post). One thing I still do not fully understand is âRemove HD Audioâ option. From what I am reading, this will basically down sample the AC-3 TrueHD audio to AC-3/5.1 if it does not have this available?

So for example, if a BR movie has both AC-3 TrueHD and AC-3 5.1, what would be the best way to get a decent quality rip?
1) Choose AC-3 5.1 (in which case the âRemove HD Audioâ option is not even an option
2) Choose AC-3 TrueHD
a. Select the âRemove HD Audioâ option?

Thank you in advance.

Regards.

IPopov50

[QUOTE=gamecaptor;41963]Hello all,

I am new to playing around with the Blu-ray to Mobile feature (as seen in my previous post). One thing I still do not fully understand is “Remove HD Audio” option. From what I am reading, this will basically down sample the AC-3 TrueHD audio to AC-3/5.1 if it does not have this available?

So for example, if a BR movie has both AC-3 TrueHD and AC-3 5.1, what would be the best way to get a decent quality rip?
1) Choose AC-3 5.1 (in which case the “Remove HD Audio” option is not even an option
2) Choose AC-3 TrueHD
a. Select the “Remove HD Audio” option?

Thank you in advance.

Regards.[/QUOTE]

gamecaptor,
your logic is breathtaking!!!! I guess, finally we've got that guy that can say "eurika!" and turn world up side down!!!! Hey, no hard feelings, I'm just kidding :D:p
But very simple experiment would of give you an instant answer. DVDFab have an awesome feature, called "preview", where you can select video and audio tracks and see what would happen. You can try...
However, if you don't want to do it, here's short answer for you - that is not main soundtrack for that movie. It could be commentary, or descriptive track (for blind people), or anything, but main movie soundtrack. For sake of fairness, I have to say that earlier BDs did had duplicate downgraded sound tracks for those who do not have HD audio capabilities, but not anymore. Studios think everybody have HD Audio systems by now, or BD Players capable to downgrade on-a-fly. Unfortunately, it's not a reality, and HD Audio removal remains a very handy feature in DVDFab. Besides, if you compressing, and do not having HD Audio capability, extra 5-6 Gig of free space (that's about how much HD component takes) wouldn't hurt.

I hope you've got to conclusion on your own by now. Your scenario (2) is the way to go.

gamecaptor

Thank you for the reply IPopov50. I have been doing some experimenting and I think that option 2 is the way to go.

Regards.

gamecaptor

Hey there IPopov50, so I've been doing some playing around with my Blu-ray rips and I'm still a little stumped on the Remove HD Audio feature. I've been using Disney's Up as my test subject. Now this movie only has DTS and AC3/2 for English audio options. Since I would like to keep it as surround sound (vs. stereo) I am choosing DTS and selecting the Remove HD Audio feature. When I rip Up choosing DTS and Remove HD Audio and play it back on either my PC or WD Live, I do not have any audio. For experiment sake I ripped it again this time NOT checking the Remove HD Audio option and I had the same results. And I looked over the results in MediaInfo and they both showed the same results.

I what I’m running into this goes along with another post by stsmith5150 ()

I’m still doing some experimenting, but I would love any input you or anyone else could provide.

Regards.

gamecaptor

I just found this interesting post:
"DTS Core Only. is the exact same as DTS on standard DVDs. The DVD spec allows up to a 1.5mbit rate on DTS tracks. In practice, most DVDs are recorded at half rate DTS at around 748kbits and Dolby Digital is encoded at 448kbits (but is capable of 640kbits).

DTS-Core is hidden in DTS-HD tracks, and allow old DTS decoders to decode the sound at the full 1.5mbit rate. Its a cool backwards compatibly factory built into the new codec. So all DTS-HD (and DTS-HD Master Audio) have the Core DTS encoded in there, without taking up extra space on the disc (ie: you don't need 2 audio tracks).

Dolby True and Dolby plus have the same kind of built in functionality. Inside the Dolby True/Plus track is an encoded Dolby Digital 5.1 track. They just call it Dolby Digital (but to compare it to DTS, you can say it is Dolby Core). That way the player doesn't need to do any guess work on Downgrading the track from 18Mbits to 640kbits. That is a huge downgrade and if left to the chips would result in missing frequencies and sounds. Thus the content provider encodes a core audio into the HD bitstream so the player does no guess work. The audio is as intended by the Director and not your decoder."

So if I understand this correctly, by chooseing "Remove HD Audio" it should give me a DTS-Core output?

IPopov50

[QUOTE=gamecaptor;42533]
So if I understand this correctly, by chooseing "Remove HD Audio" it should give me a DTS-Core output?[/QUOTE]

Correct. And depends on format, it should be in range 1510 - 1536 Kbps bitrate, which could further downgraded to most common 640 Kbps. Unless you have equipment with HD sound capability, HD track in your content just a trouble maker. A lot of people on this forum complaining about a/v sync issues (some of them legitimate issues, to be fair), have created these issues themselves...
Between us girls, I demuxing HD stream and store on separate drive, and if and when I ever get HD sound system, I will mux them back in a few minutes, rather than going through my collection again and process it again...

IPopov50

[QUOTE=gamecaptor;42530]I've been using Disney's Up as my test subject. Now this movie only has DTS and AC3/2 for English audio options. Since I would like to keep it as surround sound (vs. stereo) I am choosing DTS [/QUOTE]

You seems didn't read subject threads thoroughly... AC3/2 is not a stereo version of movie soundtrack, but commentary or some other "bonus BS". In some movies you may find one more track - descriptive track- for blind people (it describes what's going on on a screen). My wife likes it when cooking in a kitchen :D;)

When I rip Up choosing DTS and Remove HD Audio and play it back on either my PC or WD Live, I do not have any audio.

Are you using this player to play back on your computer. If not, try it and let me know: http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/download-media-player-classic-hc.html

For experiment sake I ripped it again this time NOT checking the Remove HD Audio option and I had the same results. And I looked over the results in MediaInfo and they both showed the same results.

I will let devs know, I just had a same thing with BD to MKV.

gamecaptor

Hey IPopov50,

first off thank you for your replies.

For the media playback on my PC I am using Windows Media Player 10 with Matroska Splitter plug in. Seems to play back my other BR rips with AC-3 fine; just not the DTS ones. And since the WD had the same problem, I just figured it was the rips not getting the audio correctly.

Thanks for the link to Media Player Classic. I will try it out tonight!

So it sounds like the bottom is the Remove HD Audio is not working properly. I will sit tight for the next revision and see if it gets fixed.

Now to decide what bitrate to rip my movies at.....

IPopov50

[QUOTE=gamecaptor;42824]

So it sounds like the bottom is the Remove HD Audio is not working properly. I will sit tight for the next revision and see if it gets fixed.

Now to decide what bitrate to rip my movies at.....[/QUOTE]

You know, your posts inspired me for a few experiments, and I discovered an odd things. DTS HD (MA) Audio on some of the movies mastered in a weird way. They formatted as MLPs. Valentine's Day in particular, I was experimenting with. Here's what I found:

(a) Processed it into MKV, using DVDFab, Remove HD Audio. Result - Audio still HD MA and it 3.15 Gig size. I dissected it, and it came out as MLP (one of the lossless formats). I de-muxed an original stream, and it was exactly the same. So, DVDFab just passed it through.
(b) I tried to extract core only using couple other programs without any success because it's not a "true" HD, but lossless overhead on a top of the core, makes it "lossless-like" format, which most of the programs can't do anything with.
(c) after day of "dances with tambourine" around this issue, I couldn't extract core, but was able to convert to AC3. It's a major downgrade, but makes it chewable for any player.

My conclusion is that is nothing wrong with HD removal function of DVDFab for this particular movie, but unsupported format makes DVDFab just pass it through. However, I was able to downgrade it to mp4 for iPhone with AAC 128 bit using "File to Mobile" option from MKV to mp4.