Hello,
I'm new to the board, and wasn't sure where I would post this. I'm planning to get my first DVD-audio, and at the same time, I'd like to rip it so that I can bring it around in my iRiver-iHP120.

I was wondering if there alread is the technology/software out there that would rip DVD-audios and encoding it into MP3? Or even multi-channel MP3, considering that I read it in Yahoo! news that they've discovered a way that to do so.

Cheers!

The only way to "rip" a DVD-A disc at this time (AFAIK) is to have an Audigy2 and record the output with something like Total Recorder.

AFAIK MP3 doesn't support 24bit streams . If by some chance it does, I doubt most decoders would support 24bit MP3s, so you would probably still be out of luck as far as playback on your iRiver goes.

Mp3 files does not support 24-bit streams, nor do they support 16-bit streams. They only support mp3 streams. You can't talk about bit depths when describing an mp3 file.

Mp3 encoders can support 24-bit streams as input though (I believe lame does), and benefit from the higher resolution when creating the mp3 file. If the file is decoded by an decoder with more than 16-bit resulotion (like foobar2000 and mpg123), you can get a 24-bit stream.

But the likelyhood of hardware players supporting more than 16 bits is, as you said, low.

Ah, I see. That's alright. I thought that I'd try to bring around a portable version of my DVD-audio, instead of only just playing it at home.

Cheers anyways!