I have a suggestion for a new nero plugin: ac3

why is this important?
it would speed up encoding from ac3 to any other format in nero a lot!
now everybody who wants to transcode his ac3 file (most of the time with 6 channels) has to decode it to .wav first (which causes huge filesizes in many cases) and then he can encode it with nero
with an ac3 plugin it would be possible to transcode directly in nero which would save time and space!

as an encoder there exists free ac3enc (sources are included) which is also used in besweet
as an decoder (which will be the most important i think) you could use the source from valex' ac3filter or the free tool azid (although i dont know where you can get the sources for the last one)!

mausau writes on his page that "if you'd like to develop plugin for Nero, you have to get here the latest Nero Plugin SDK from Nero website"


i hope anybody has the skills and the will to write such a plugin (i only have the will )? it would really help using the nero audio-encoding features (especially mp4/aac)

you can grap the latest ac3enc sources (from ffmpeg project) here
valex' ac3filter uses liba52 project for ac3 decoding, get the latest sources here!

i suggest writing a BeSweet.dll wrapper for NERO.

great idea but it seems that mausau (who already wrote many plugins) has problems writing such a thing

perhaps you can have a look at it

Ciao..


the new nero6.. has DS support..
(also VST..)

i got a mail from mausau on this issue:



dspguru?

azid.exe known to have (had, imho!) issues with stdin/stdout.
anyway, tell Mr. Mausau to use azid.dll .


ps,
directshow support means you could use AC3Filter as ac3 decoder for nero.

Isn't azid based on liba52 too?

not at all !

great news!!!

thanks to mau sau there now is an .ac3 decoder plugin for nero available (based on azid)
grap it here!

now it should be possible to directly transcode from .ac3 to .mp4 in nero without a wave in between

enjoy

Excellent. Has anyone tested the quality of the HE AAC for multichannel (5.1)? What kind of bitrates can we look at for reasonable quality (not transparency)?

Is it tuned for surround sound at all (ie channel coupling, different qualities and lowpasses for channels, etc...)?

I dunno if it's just me, but when I tried a direct .ac3 -> .mp4 transcode, the channels were directed incorrectly. Is this due to the ordering of the input channels in the AAC encoder as mentioned in another thread? If so, would there be any way to make the AC3 decoder reorganize the channels to match the input order on Nero's AAC plugin until we can choose what the input order is?

Surround channels are not being decoded.

I think you should submit a bug report to Mausau. Maybe asking him to create reordering options for the decoder.

since i installed this plugin, Nero Waveeditor produces an error wehwn i close it.

New version out.

seems like my bugging helped

ps:
view the screenshots to see how you can tweak the azid settings!

hm, it doesnt seem to work with he-aac encoding (nero just quits)
with lc-aac it seems to work fine...

anyone too having problems with he-aac?

plug-in doesn´t work at all:

-Opens always 6 channels, also when it is stereo
-by saving crash (AAC, OGG, AIFF) or error message (FLAC)
-Playback doesn´t work

Edit: AAC = HE-AAC and LC-AAC

Did you configure the plugin?

hm, dont have a stereo file to test it (perhaps someone can send me a small one plz )

edit: ah i think i now know what you mean:
you have a 2.0 ac3 input file but the output files always have 6 channels
-> you have to change the decoder settings (remove all channels in the output channel sequence tab except ch_l and ch_r)


you mean encoding/decoding?
for me encoding works with lc-aac, decoding also seem to work with aiff (didnt test anything else now)
edit: ogg encoding works too

are you sure you are using the latest version (from today)?


yup

thanks to mfluder, who found a workaround for the he-aac bug (yes it's definitely a bug in nero's aac plugin):

hm, can somebody confirm that the last second of the ac3 isnt getting decoded by the ac3 plugin (try ac3->wav in besweet and nero (both using azid) and compare the ends)

ok here a small summarized bug report i just sent to mausau, if someone is interested or knows solutions as i dont know if all of the bugs are caused by the ac3 plugin or nero itself:

1) when using ac3 decoder to transcode from ac3 -> he-aac nero just quits (some failure in aacenc.dll)! surprisingly ac3 -> lc-aac transcoding works without a problem!
but it happens only if you hit 'Settings' and 'OK' and even if you don't even change anything it will crash, if you hit 'Cancel' it won't crash. And this only happens if HE AAC is selected, with LC AAC it works fine and it doesn't matter how much you mess with the settings, it will never crash.
hm, i just saw that this he-aac bug seems to be resolved with the .30 version, but only for 2channel input, it doesnt work with multichannel
input...

2) when using the ac3 plugin (version .30) in NeroMIX it starts but never finishes! when using the plugin in normal nero it finishes but the file length is a little bit longer (let's say the source ac3 is 1:00 than the output file will be 1:10 (in the last 10 seconds there is no sound, just silence) - seems like normal nero is smart enough to check that there is a failure and interrupts decoding whereas neromix still continues...)
in ac3 plugin version .29 neromix also just continued as described above, but normal nero outputted a file with the right length - 1:00

3) i tested a 5.1 ac3 file and wanted to downmix it to stereo, so i used the following options:
2 front, 0 rear
output channel sequence: ch_l and ch_r (btw. i hope these settings are the right ones for downmixing?)

ok, with these settings i saw that the last part (half a second or so) of the ac3 isnt getting decoded by the ac3 plugin in normal nero (try ac3 -> wav with azid.exe and in nero with your plugin and compare the ends)
i could also verify that the cutted end only occurs if ch_l and ch_r are chosen under "output channel sequence" (if all 6 channels are chosen (even if the 5.1 ac3 is decoded to 2 channels, the failure doesnt occur)
this doesnt happen in neromix (there it decodes the end correctly but doesnt stop as described above)
this happens with both .29 and .30

the new ac3 (1.0.0.30) plugin now crashes waveeditor (2.0.0.11) already when starting.

ok, i checked all bugs i was aware of:

1) he-aac shut down issue - resolved for 2/0 output, not working for multichannel (-> "failure in aacenc32.dll")

2) encoding doesnt finish in nero mix - still there

3) cutted end with 2/0 output - resolved with ogg vorbis, lc-aac and wav (outputs exactly the same filesize as azid.exe), dont resolved with he-aac encoding (half a second is cut out)! didnt test anything else till now

4) ac3 playback in neromix works (choppy)

5) opening an .ac3 in wave editor works


anyone to confirm these results?