A question about lossless audio formats.

[mpalm887]

Trying to back-up my copy of Casino Royale to MKV with lossless audio.

I've already encoded the video portion only with RipBot264, but of course ripbot won't remux in the PCM with the encode, you have to down-mix lossless audio to AC3 or AAC, which I don't want to do.

In the past I've used MKVMerge GUI to mux h264 and .flac lossless audio but I've got a problem with this particular film: the audio has been ripped out as .w64 and MKVMerge doesn't read it. Furthermore, even if I could get something to merge it in I have doubts about what devices could actually read the audio as I don't see official support for .w64 on my (future) playback devices (Popcorn A-110 & Denon AVR-1910 or similar), although they obviously support PCM.

Another weird thing is that I have done this exact Blu-ray a couple of weeks ago and was certain that the audio was pulled out as .flac. I ended up losing the finished file when I reformatted just a couple of days ago and it's entirely possible I haven't accumulated all the original codecs I had before. But does that matter?

What I'm looking for is feedback on how to handle the .w64 situation. Should I try to find a way to convert to .flac or something else? Or are modern playback devices able to decode wave files in .w64 format?

[Midzuki]

You can convert .W64 to FLAC with Avisynth + the plugins RaWav & SoundOut.

[poisondeathray]

Or just re-rip it, the original is lpcm (truehd if you have the collector's edition) ; how did you get a w64 file ?

[mpalm887]

Or just re-rip it, the original is lpcm (truehd if you have the collector's edition) ; how did you get a w64 file ?

No flippin' idea. I've got the K-Lite codec pack installed, then the basic tools for RipBot264, TSMuxer, MKVToolnix. That's it. Why would RipBot pull it out as .w64 when it did .flac before? I've done the demux twice now and it's been .w64 both times.

What's usually the file extension for lpcm? And when you say truehd are you saying that the collectors edition is Dobly TrueHD? For my tracks listed on the back of the case I have English PCM 5.1 (Uncompressed) and then AC3 for all the other languages. It's not the collector's edition.

Is there any loss when converting .w64 to .flac?

And is .flac what I want for playback on a PH A-110?

[poisondeathray]

No it's lossless

So you can a) re-rip the .lpcm then convert to .flac

or

b) convert the .w64 to .flac (e.g. with avisynth + soundout)

WavSource("file.w64")
SoundOut()

[mpalm887]

K so then you're confirming that I want .flac for lossless PCM tracks being muxed into MKV files for playback through a receiver then right? Or can I just mux back in the .lpcm file with the encoded h264 video?

And... let me just ask you something while I've got you then. So Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA are "lossless compressed" is that right? So when I demux a DTS-HD stream with Ripbot will it come out as .lpcm or as .dts?

Just wondering because on another rip I'm getting .dts when I demux the DTS MA. Don't these HD formats get decompressed to PCM when they are played from a Blu-ray and go through a receiver?

[poisondeathray]

K so then you're confirming that I want .flac for lossless PCM tracks being muxed into MKV files for playback through a receiver then right? Or can I just mux back in the .lpcm file with the encoded h264 video?

lpcm is huge, uncompressed, that's why most people convert to flac (compressed about 70-80% of the size, but still lossless), and it works in .mkv

And... let me just ask you something while I've got you then. So Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA are "lossless compressed" is that right? So when I demux a DTS-HD stream with Ripbot will it come out as .lpcm or as .dts?

ripbot won't do either, I think the "dts" intermediate you are getting is the lossy dts core dump, and it can't encode to normal dts (which is lossy anyways). Yes THD and DTS-MA are lossless compressed.

Just wondering because on another rip I'm getting .dts when I demux the DTS MA. Don't these HD formats get decompressed to PCM when they are played from a Blu-ray and go through a receiver?

It depends on your setup, but I think most decode to pcm on the fly. Double check, the .dts that you are getting from ripbot might be the .dts core only (i.e. regular .dts (lossy)). EDIT: Yes, I just checked, it's just the core dump when you use ripbot = lossy.

Although ripbot partly uses eac3to and tsmuxer, most people use them separately to process the audio (if you want to keep HD audio).

Another option is just to keep the original audio, .mkv container support THD and DTS-MA now, but not sure if your device supports it (you might need .m2ts container which has 5-7% larger overhead than .mkv container)

[mpalm887]

lpcm is huge, uncompressed, that's why most people convert to flac (compressed about 70-80% of the size, but still lossless), and it works in .mkv

How huge are we talking? The .w64 and .flac files I'm getting off of Casino Royale are over 4GB and I'm cool with that. Ideally I'd like to always keep the original audio untouched, so long as it's less than around 4GB. It sounds like if I want to keep my lpcm or TrueHD/DTS-MA I need to be using a different tool to demux my Blu-rays.

I'll keep using RipBot to encode my video/subs but what would you recommend me use to pull out original audio off the Blu-ray back-up folder's .mt2s file? Then I'll just use MKVMerge to put it back together with my encoded video.

[poisondeathray]

Yep, >4GB that's "normal" for HD audio. "huge" is a relative term , so compared to DVD AC3 audio it's huge! If you compress the original audio to flac it's often around 4GB.

BTW, the new ripbot (1.14.1) allows flac conversion directly from THD

v1.14.1
Added: PCM, TrueHD and EAC3 can be optionally converted to FLAC
Added: muxing flac into .mkv

Not sure about DTS-MA (changelog doesn't say), but the old way of doing it was to use either EAC3TO or TSMuxer to extract the untouched audio from the original

[mpalm887]

Not sure about DTS-MA (changelog doesn't say), but the old way of doing it was to use either EAC3TO or TSMuxer to extract the untouched audio from the original

JUST saw that today. I'll update my version. Thanks for all the help.

[mpalm887]

Downloaded eac3to to try to mux out the HD audio streams and lpcm. Wasn't quite as easy as I thought, although I'm sure I could catch the hang of eac3to GUI. But I may have found another solution. Can I use MakeMKV to port out the audio I want and then just use RipBot to encode my video and then I'll use MKVMerge to put it all back together?

Reason I ask is that once again with MakeMKV the DTS and DTS-HD streams both show up as dts 3/2 channel audio tracks. I want to make sure I'm not getting just regular DTS.

[poisondeathray]

command line is actually easier to use for eac3to, the gui takes a while to setup paths, and is a bit confusing

If you want easy way, just use tsmuxer and demux. Select the audio track and make sure downmix is unchecked. Check the output logfile , if it says dts-hd (core+MLP data) then you know it's the real thing not just the core dump. I would say eac3to is better because it fixes gaps and discontinunities, but the newer versions of tsmuxer seem to work fine. You can double check again by using mediainfo on the demuxed file

Cheers