Whats better in TMPGEnc, MP2 or PCM audio?

[thesicilian]

Hi guys,

Which is better quality audio, VBR MPEG-1 Layer II Audio (MP2) or PCM audio when converting in TMPGEnc? Or is there not much difference?

[Craig Tucker]

PCM will be better quality assuming a good quality source as it is uncompressed. MP2 is compressed but the difference will not be noticable by most peoples ears. The problem with PCM is it will take up a large percentage of your disc space as the audio stream alone will run to approximately 10MB/min. This will obviousy seriously reduce the amount of bitrate you can allocate to your video stream.

Another option you have is to use an external encoder for your audio and encode to AC3.

[thesicilian]

Could I convert an audio file which is Fraunhofer IIS Mpeg Layer-3 to ac3 using besweet gui then just add it to the authoring software?

BTW thanks for your reply.

[Craig Tucker]

Sure, although I would reccommend ffmpeggui for the mp3-ac3 conversion, its much simpler to use than besweet, I also read that besweet does not create totally compliant ac3 files so it can cause problems in some players, cannot confirm this though.

[jgandara]

I think the latest version of besweet doesn't do that anymore, you get a message that it sucks. I asked the same question before and it's whort it if you have more than 2 channels and because it's more compressed than PCM, other than that, you would hear the same thing with PCM or ac3

[thesicilian]

Thanks for your help guys.