All of your information correlates to what I've discovered.
But thank you for more test data ^__^.
I put the rest of the REing til the beginning of April (sometime in the next 2 weeks).
I'm now using the work-a-round mentioned previously for my encodes. And it maintains
full compatibility throughout all of my devices. But the drawback is not being able to select
audio tracks on the AppleTV (haven't tested it on the iPhone/Touch yet). Which is what we're both
after I'm sure.
But this is the thing that bugs me that absolute most about this whole thing,
and makes me start to wonder about full compatibility across devices/software.
You see, every different playback software handles the tracks differently.
Every single one. Not one of them is consistent. AppleTV defaults & orders
tracks differently than Quicktime, which handles audio tracks different than iTunes,
which handles tracks differently than VLC, which handles things differently than the iPhone,
etc...
See what I'm sayin? Multiple tracks is a 'bag of hurt'
.
The only reason the current implementation is working
with AAC/AC3 is because there's only two tracks each of a different
format. But even then, although completely compatible, the two tracks
are handled and ordered differently depending on the device your viewing it on.
Here's what the devices do:
AppleTV : Don't display either and select track based on preferences.
iTunes : Display both the tracks ordered by Language (only English) & track-id (or index-id, not sure)
Quicktime : Display both the tracks ordered by AC3 first and then AAC (unsure about this, but thats what it looks to me, but I don't really care about QT enough to figure it out)
iPhone : Display only AAC tracks ordered by id, ignore AC3 tracks (unsure of specifics, needs more testing)
VLC : Can't remember ;P.
They're all different. And that's only with 2 tracks. It gets more complex when you add into alt groups, more track-ids,
more languages, more formats, etc.
But I'm still working on this.
So expect an update in 1-2 weeks.
Let me know if you have any questions, cause it'd be great to have more test data if your willing ^__^.
Does anyone have a dual language file from Apple? It might explain a lot... The (few) video downloads I've had from them only have a single AAC soundtrack.
I'd love to find one ;P.
Would shed a lot of light on things.
Same as an iTunes Store Subtitled video.
AppleTV breaks that, perhaps deliberately as we don't know how it chooses. That said, I still wonder if we're trying to fix something we haven't broken, but Apple have?
Seems very likely.
Apple does generally wait to properly support anything until they use it.
iTunes movie HD-SD encodes are an example of this.
There had to be a hack work around until Apple released HD movies.
And now it works as expected.
So when Apple starts using multiple Audio in iTunes,
we'll have proper support.
Until then, we've got to figure out a work-a-round.
;P