How to shrink an MKV while retaining HD audio

[lordhutt]

As the subject says...

I have MKV files with HD audio that I ripped with MakeMKV.
Many or even most I will leave as is, but there are some movies that just simply do not need to be 30 gig!
I would like to shrink them down to around 10 if possible and still keep the HD audio.
I saw a couple threads saying handbreak is great for this but they also mentioned that it wont handle the HD audio.

Any other options?

[yoda313]

sure ripbot264. Use copy audio.

I think the other way if you had to use handbreak would be to do the conversion and then simply replace the audio later. At this moment I can't recommend a tool to simply replace the audio. Something like tsmuxer might do the trick if this is a mkv with h264 you are talking about. You would load your newly made mkv from handbreak and deselect the existing audio and load your original audio.

I think you can demux the original audio with eac3to. If not that then you can try tsmuxer.

To be honest its been a little while since I've worked with a bluray rip so this information might be a little outdated.

[johns0]

Use handbrake and select dts-hd passthru,it will only encode the video and leave the audio untouched so the mkv will be smaller with the same audio.

[yoda313]

Use handbrake and select dts-hd passthru,it will only encode the video and leave the audio untouched so the mkv will be smaller with the same audio.

Interesting. Will that work with all audio formats that bluray has? That makes me think it would only work with dts-hd master audio. Is this just their name for passthrough for ALL audio then for hd?

[johns0]

Handbrake has passthru for most types of audio such as ac3,aac,mp3,dts,dts-hd etc.You can also set it to encode the audio to ac3 or aac if you wished.

[lordhutt]

Thanks guys... I'll give this a shot later tonight.

[Noahtuck]

Handbrake also has an audio option called "auto passthru", their spelling not mine, LOL!

And does not re-encode what ever type of audio you have.

[lordhutt]

If that's the case then this should be simple... I've never used the program as I've mentioned I just always leave all my rips as is.
Until now that is... the threads I read saying Handbrake couldn't do this must have been older.

[Noahtuck]

I have used it a few times to shrink down movies to 8gb mkv's while retaining the original audio track.
It blanks out the other audio settings as it is just passing the original audio through.

[lordhutt]

Well, I did a movie... the auto passthru did not work for me. It gave me 6 channel AC-3
I did it again selecting DTS-HD Passthru and got the (DTS (MA/Core)
That added 2.5 gig to the file! I knew it would be a bit more but that was a little more than I thought.

Anyway, it works. Just have to use the DTS-HD Passthru.

Thanks all.