Surround vorbis Options

[electrick]

I'm ripping movies to mkv files with x264 video and surround vorbis sound (5.1 or higher). What's might be the lowest bitrate or quality level used to not destroy the surround channel effects?
Also, so far I have only figured out how to rip dvd. If I get around to bluray, some movies use 7.1. Is vorbis good for 7.1 also? And do you think it has a future?

[electrick]

I'm probably in for some bashing here, BUT:

I did some tests a while ago, to find a way to compress AC3/DTS more than the usual 384kbit found on DVD's. I tried both AAC and OGG - The results? Not good... They aren't optimized for multichannel. The way I understand it; they don't do something similar to "Joint Stereo" to optimize bit-usage. I wasn't able to lower the bitrate much more than the 384kbit without sacrifying audible quality, and then it's quite pointless. Therefore I keep the AC3 track when I "Handbrake" my DVD's into x264

And do you think it has a future?

Blurays store the audio in much higher bitrates. You may be able to benefit more from transcoding these to a lower bitrate. You can use eac3to to do that.

Really, I think the future is not so limiting on the storage-side. I would much rather keep the encodings as they are and just buy a larger harddrive, now they are so cheap

How long ago did you do those tests? The only reason I'm considering it now is because the update to libvorbis 1.3.1 mentions something about 5.1 optimizations. Is that all hype? And what is wrong with joint stereo? I understand it's actually a great way to reduce size without reducing sound quality. I seem to remember reading some flame wars around here about the very issue of the mp3 joint stereo inferiority being a myth.

Is there a reason to recompress audio though? 640kbps for DD in blu-ray seems more than sufficient, and probably the most compatible multichannel format there is. Pretty much the same for DTS. Blu-rays come with either an embedded DD track when the main one is TrueHD, and DTS has the DTS "core" on DTS-HD, which can be extracted very easily.

As for 7.1 audio, I'm one of the early adopters, and very very few movies (and even fewer good ones) make any use of it.

Also, a good reason not to recompress is that your decoder can then apply metadata such as DRC and DPLII(x), or DTS-ES matrix.

I'm not doing this to store any material. I'm still going to keep the discs around. The idea I have behind this is to have them for playback on the PC without messing with the discs, and perhaps to carry around on a smartphone. Another reason is that I use linux and playing a bluray selection on there is pretty ridiculous. You pretty much have to rip just to watch. Not that bluray playback is much better on windows with all that restricted hardware and drm stuff. But either way if I encode this, it will be batched and I'd like it to be as optimized as possible.

This post has been edited by electrick: Sep 15 2010, 01:53

[odyssey]

How long ago did you do those tests? The only reason I'm considering it now is because the update to libvorbis 1.3.1 mentions something about 5.1 optimizations. Is that all hype? And what is wrong with joint stereo? I understand it's actually a great way to reduce size without reducing sound quality. I seem to remember reading some flame wars around here about the very issue of the mp3 joint stereo inferiority being a myth.

1 or 2 years ago. If the changelog says something about 5.1 optimizations, you should really try it out - Sounds like something that were not available when I conducted the tests Read my post again regarding Joint Stereo - I'm not saying it's a bad thing.

Another thing: How much do you expect to be able to compress them? 192kbit? 224kbit? - Maybe less?? I gave up on it because the gap up to the 384kbit were too small to give much benefit.