Audio encoding

[nasruddin]

This is not exactly a handbrake problem - I'm looking for advice on audio encoding.

Recently I played a video that had been processed by MakeMKV from a Blu-Ray. The audience is made of people many of whom are
rather hard of hearing and rely on subtitles, and we had to play the video thru my makemkv rip from a disk drive as the blu-ray disc
itself is no longer functional.

The 1st problem was the subtitles didn't work. They are in some kind of image format, apparently the blu-ray drive doesn't like
this, so I can fix this by just burning them in with handbrake. I like standards because there are so many to choose from.

The 2nd problem is the audio is strange. At this playing I found what I heard of it a little hard to understand, and when the characters in the video
were shouting at each other or there was loud noise, I could hear some kind of audio compression or clipping taking place, the volume even
seemed to drop a little. The audience could understand next to nothing - that's way worse than usual even for this group. It sounded rather
odd to me but I could manage.

There are multiple audio tracks available, handbrake identifies 2 of them as
DTS-HD MA 5.1 ch
DTS 5.1 ch 1536 kbps
I'm not sure what either of these really mean but the first one seems to be larger & I'm guessing it may be better (or maybe does
some kind of surround better). I don't hear any difference myself on my computer or headphones & don't hear the weird compression
or clipping effect either.

Can handbrake help here? It seems to want to encode them to AAC (probably a default in a preset), but I see there are some pass-thrus
here. I don't know much about this. A problem is I am not a good judge of the best encoding anyway because, well, I can make sense
of the audio & the audience can't. I suppose I could massage the audio with a more targeted app & reload but I'm not sure what
to do. Any advice appreciated. I have to reencode things like this to burn in subtitles so I'd like to try to make it a little more intelligible too.

[Rodeo314]

If you cannot hear the audio artifacts on the computer, I would suspect the playback environment. What exactly is your setup used for playback in front of an audience (i.e. what is the Blu-ray player connected to)?

[nasruddin]

I don't really know much about it but I think the owner has some kind of blu-ray player (brand I can't see from the container) attached
to a mixer or amp. Generally speaking, everything else done on that setup sounds good, so I am thinking it's some weirdness with the
blu-ray player, or particularly something about how the player deals with content coming from a usb connected disk.

I wouldn't do things this way myself but not in my control.

I'm just guessing but thinking there's some kind of compression issue (either too much or too little) and wondering if an audio re-encoding
might help. I just don't know enough about this to know what to do. It's a hard experiment to conduct wince apparently our personal
capabilities are very different. Maybe it's a question of audio encoding for the mildly hearing impaired.

[Rodeo314]

Well most HandBrake presets re-encode audio to AAC indeed, You could give it a try, and if it doesn't improve things you could try encoding AC3 instead.

[rollin_eng]

Could you please post your HB logs, instructions can be found here:

https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/hel ... y-log.html

[nasruddin]

Log files are irrelevant in this case - asking for advice