DTS or AC3 to AAC Options

[141077]

Hello there!

I'm from Germany so please excuse me if my english isn't very well. I currently work on something for my university. I'm gonna right down the process of converting an HD .mkv file to an iTunes friendly .m4v. The goal will be to have a file at the end which can be played on most Apple devices. So when there's one 5.1 audio track as a DTS or AC3 file in the mkv I want to have one 5.1 AAC audio track and one in stereo for the mobile devices. In the last two days I've been looking around for the best options and encoders in this forum and in the wiki, but I'm not quite sure what to use and what's even more important: why I should use that?

For this process I'll use a mac. I've read that the Nero Encoder give the best results but since it doesn't excepts .dts or .ac3 files I don't know what I could do. Should I convert the .dts file f.e. first into another format so that NeroAAC would recognize it? Wouldn't that mean a loose of Quality? That's by the way also a very important thing for my work. To know what would be the best options in the encoder and to know how big the quality loss could be etc.

I hope you can point me into some directions and tell me something relevant for my topic. Have a good night everyone!

[141077]

as a 2nd option you might want to check my hippy OSX ffmpeg encoder idea;
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=162621

Can someone please explain me how that is possible? Are thos 384 VBR for each channel? I just can't imagine how that could be enough for a DTS track with about 1500 constant.

This post has been edited by db1989: Nov 2 2011, 20:00

Reason for edit: as above; please do not needlessly quote huge posts in full

[saratoga]

I just can't imagine how that could be enough for a DTS track with about 1500 constant.

DTS is huge because its not very efficient. For modern codecs, 160k to 192k per stereo pair is plenty.