Which is better - BeSweet or HeadAC3he. And why ?

[claypillar]

I've a 448Kbps 5.1 ac3 audio track. To fit into CD rips, I like to reduce the bitrate to 384Kbps. So, in order to test the quality I cut a small piece of audio and tested it by re-encoding the audio file to 384Kbps(retaining 5.1 channels) with both BeSweet v1.5b29 and the with Headac3he v0.24-a13. I found that the output from headac3he is much louder and clearer than from besweet when played in WinDVD. The same files when played in VLC media player don't tend to show that difference. I personally believe that WinDVD is the correct measuring tool for ac3 audio.

What do u guys say. Is Headac3he a better re-encoding tool than BeSweet. If yes, I need to free up a lot of hard disk space, as Headac3he requires a lot of space for audio encoding unlike BeSweet which requires absolutely no free space.

[mikiem]

There's a few options you'll find by checking the forum threads -- generally think the ffmpg methods are a bit better then besweet, but check it out.

As for the volume, there are level settings within the ac3 file, & they can be set differently, & might or might not be read. I'd also bet WinDVD & similar have a bit of dynamic range compression -- in Power DVD it can be set, but not sure about WinDVD -- and if playing back stereo, probably have different methods of folding channels down to 2.

[celtic_druid]

Both use the same decoding and encoding libs.