audio encoding

[chris42773]

basically for space on my hard drive ive been encoding concert movies for use on PLEX..the video emcoding is pretty cut and dry no issues...but the audio end with AAC is really starting to irritate me with Handbrake...i use handbrake to convert both video and audio..but i have realized that Handbrake uses a new AAC encoder or has been for a few years now and its flaw is it crashes at high peaks whereas the old AAC encoder (Nero Encoder) is not around anymore that i could find outside of mediacoder...so ive been taking these concert movies and converting them in Handbrake (x264 L4.1 3500 kbps mp4)and passthrough on the audio but the problem use the audio is usually LPCM where handbrake cant pass it through so i have to convert to AC3 and then convert to AAC in Mediacoder (i really want to keep using AAC as my audio)...please can i get a opinion or better way to do this

[sneaker]

What version of HandBrake are you using? The latest HandBrake is based on ffmpeg, as is MediaCoder. There shouldn't be any difference in AAC encoding quality except on Mac where HandBrake uses the Apple AAC encoder which is commonly considered the best AAC encoder.

There is a user guide to compile HandBrake with FDK-AAC encoder (Fraunhofer) but it has not yet been updated to account for HandBrake >= 1.2.0.

[chris42773]

the latest version and im on windows..but this version is where i noticed it a lot..you hear a lot of wow and flutter...i read somewhere that the FDK one is bad too nut quote me on that

[sneaker]

Try HandBrake nightly and ffmpeg itself to see if you get the same problem.

[chris42773]

i think i may try that or i could try to doing the whole job with mediacoder and all its options...i think the AAC encoder has at least 15 different options to choose from including ffmpeg..thank you for your help

[pandy]

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=AAC
http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=AAC_encoders

Apple AAC is probably wise choice but personally prefer "FhG" AAC.
FDK is 16 bit, fully integer and as such acceptable/recommended for portable/mobile target but suboptimal for HQ.