HandBrake

Every Blu-ray disc with LPCM should also have a legacy Dolby Digital (AC3) soundtrack, which will usually be at 640kbps and will sound pretty good. The best thing to do would be to pass through the AC3 track to either MP4 or MKV. Not all receivers can handle 640kbps AC3 (since on DVD it topped out a...

Is it not the case that using CABAC at a given CRF has no bearing on the quality of the resulting video, only on its bitrate/filesize? If it is the case, then if you're not too worried about filesize then wouldn't CRF at 57%-59% without CABAC be better than CRF at 55% with CABAC? I settled on that a...

Is there any particular reason why you want the dialogue to come out of the L+R channels as well as the centre? Many films with multichannel audio are deliberately mixed so that the dialogue comes through the centre speaker most of the time, since that's the speaker physically aligned with the scree...

...but we're still hoping, maybe, some sunny day.

That's why I said "many" and not "all". The majority (>50%) of Blu-rays indeed have an AC3 track, whether it's the only track, an interleaved AC3/TrueHD track or a secondary track accompanying LPCM. It's mandatory for a Blu-ray to have either AC3 or DTS, but not both. So we can s...

This here link http://www.networkedmediatank.com/wiki/index.php/Convert_DTS_to_AC3 is apparently how to convert DTS to AC3 on OS X (I haven't tried it). If you're using Windows, eac3to will do the job more simply. I wonder if a future version of Handbrake might include DTS to AC3 encoding using libd...

eac3to also removes pulldown flags from any HD-DVD video, whether VC1 or H.264. It's also much faster than vc1conv, and does the video conversion at the same time as converting eg DD+ to AC3. I haven't found a reason to use any program other than eac3to and tsMuxeR to get files that Handbrake will c...

Probably more accurate to say that until fairly recently AC3 was not supported in the MP4 standard, and many (especially hardware) players haven't caught up yet. I would be surprised if the WDTV could read it, the NMTs definitely can't, so for those purposes MKV is probably better.

Check that your Audio MIDI Setup properties are at 48kHz and haven't switched back to 44.1kHz -- that's often what causes the machine-gun chatter.

The aTV should handle 25fps fine if your TV can do 50Hz. You need to change the output to a 50Hz resolution in the menu (or the popup menu using the remote control), though -- the aTV won't switch automatically (as you've noticed).

If you can't be bothered re-ripping to Universal from your original DVD, then I would recommend creating an iPhone version from your AppleTV version using the Handbrake preset. The iPhone version will be pretty small and encode very quickly, and you won't be able to see the quality loss on the iPhon...

If you install a UDF driver (there is one floating around the web for the Toshiba HD-DVD Xbox360 drive), you should be able to point eac3to directly at the disc (after AnyDVD HD has done its magic of course). I'd think this would be quicker than completely ripping the disc, but how much so I'm not ...

Sure, as long as there is a suitable audio track on the original Blu-ray -- if there's only DTS on the disc, for example, then you won't end up with a surround track. You'll need to convert it to AC3 using eac3to to give Handbrake something to pass through. eac3to also does useful stuff like removin...

Because you can only use it with x264.

I guess my main question is, if there is no AC3 version availble, or there is a combo track, like TrueHD+AC3, how do I go about getting an ac3 track to work with? peters' post seems to imply that by specifying .ac3 as the extension for a audio track that eac3to will convert to ac3 while demuxing. I...

You have to specify all of the tracks you want to extract, and the format in which to extract/convert them. Use "eac3to" to list the titles, "eac3to 1)" to list the tracks in the first title, and eg "eac3to 1) 1: movie.chapters.txt 2: movie.h264 3: movie.ac3" to extract...

Sorry I meant chapters as well, but accidentally typed subtitles, it must be going around

Thanks for the tips.

I've made a lot of progress in 24 hours, and now have encoded both a Bluray and HDDVD title and successfully inserted chapter markers and soft subtitles. To fix my problem with chapter markers getting progressively further off on the HDDVD I ripped, I used a freeware program named ChapterGrabber (W...

Wonder if anyone else has seen this yet. I have a few .m4v files that I had muxed subtitles into using muxo. I have tried to use subler to remove the subtitle track that was added with muxo, then re-add the original .srt file back using subler. The file plays in itunes, but crashes my TV. I've red...

I'm so looking forward to the next Snapshot! I just converted my Transformers HD DVD to AppleTV format using the preset @ 60% and it looks fantastic, it's the best thing I've seen on my ATV. Of course I had to remux it to a TS with 640k AC3 first, but if future builds can do stuff like extract the A...

The 640x480/2500 limits were for the 5.5G iPod, everything since is quite a bit more capable. I don't think we know exactly what the new limits are, but there's an indicative table over here: http://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3859 . That's how come the new Universal preset works so w...

Or you could just be patient Snapshots come out fairly regularly.

I have noticed that AC3-only files from Handbrake play fine using Graham's hack, but AppleTV AAC+AC3 files from Handbrake when played on the Mac will (initially) only work with the AAC and not the AC3 track, which only gives static. Could it have something to do with the channel mapping? I notice th...

If the shape of the movie is different from the shape of your TV (eg your TV is 16:9, the movie is 2.4:1) then of course there is no way to fill the screen with the movie unless you stretch it or crop it. If you absolutely insist on mangling the movie to fit your TV screen, you can either (1) rip it...

Who is this Loose Ana? She sounds a lot more fun than Strict Ana (let alone Santa Ana).