What's the difference betwen AAC, AC3, and DTS audio's for movies?

[Eagleman]

Okay so I normally try download people who do Blu-Ray 720p and there's always the option of getting AAC 5.1 and AC3 5.1 which is better? Seems like the AC3 would seem so because it's usually close to 1 GB larger file than the AAC. And also how would you compare these to DTS? thanks

[hech54]

Okay so I normally try download people who do Blu-Ray 720p

You mean illegal downloads of Hollywood movies from torrent sites?

[jman98]

All 3 are lossy audio compression formats. AAC is what Apple standardized on and you see it used mostly because Apple devices like it, although I think there may be some European TV broadcast support for it too (not sure on that). AC3 works just about everywhere so it's a good choice if you want to be sure your playback device will work with it. DTS produces a louder sound than other formats and tests have shown that humans will perceive a louder sound as being of higher quality than a softer sound of the same thing. DTS throws away some upper frequencies to compress its audio. Many people swear by it, but we've had a few industry insiders post here about the truth behind it. They're sworn to secrecy because of non-disclosure agreements, but they have strongly hinted that DTS may actually be a lot less faithful to the original sound than most people realize. Honestly they're all pretty good but DTS would typically take up the most space.

[Eagleman]

All 3 are lossy audio compression formats. AAC is what Apple standardized on and you see it used mostly because Apple devices like it, although I think there may be some European TV broadcast support for it too (not sure on that). AC3 works just about everywhere so it's a good choice if you want to be sure your playback device will work with it. DTS produces a louder sound than other formats and tests have shown that humans will perceive a louder sound as being of higher quality than a softer sound of the same thing. DTS throws away some upper frequencies to compress its audio. Many people swear by it, but we've had a few industry insiders post here about the truth behind it. They're sworn to secrecy because of non-disclosure agreements, but they have strongly hinted that DTS may actually be a lot less faithful to the original sound than most people realize. Honestly they're all pretty good but DTS would typically take up the most space.

Jman98 thank you so much! You answered my question perfectly, i think i will go with AC3. Is the reason why AC3 takes up more space because it works with about every playback device?