Add 5.1 to m4v file without reencoding video?

[jaredhite1]

Hello-
I'm just finishing up a large encoding project where I've encoded all my DVDs to h.264 m4v files using Handbrake's "normal" preset. However, I'm noticing that the preset I chose doesn't preserve the 5.1 surround sound tracks from my DVDs. For many of my DVDs I don't particularly care about the surround sound, but for others I do care. Of course I could just start over and do it properly from within handbrake but I've had 5 computers working for about a week on encoding all my ripped DVDs so I'd rather avoid redoing that if I can.

Is there any way to add whatever surround sound track my DVDs have into the m4v files without reencoding the video?

If it matters, I'd like to play these files on my android phone, my wife's iPhone, (hopefully) using the USB port on a Roku, and most importantly on three XBMC-based HTPCs. If there's a non-free product that makes this possible or less painful, I'll be happy to purchase it.

Thanks in advance.

[RabidDog]

try using avidemux ... its free but it still obviously requires you to rip the 5.1 sound, save as an ac3 file? then strip the old sound off and remux the new sound and video.

Hmmm just re-encode the ones you care about..

I have no idea whether the phones can handle big files with big audio(5.1)

[nateo200]

I did this the other day when ripping my DVD set of Band of Brothers...I let the DTS passthrough figuring it was 24bit so a bit of an edge over Dolby 5.1 but regretted it later and used handbrake to transcode. Basically I open the DVD source and set the video settings to AppleTV preset (or any preset really doesn't need to be done) and set the first track as Dolby Digital (6-channel discrete) and set the picture settings to as crappy as possible...lowest resolution, lowest reference frames, etc. under the advanced features. Throw it in an .Mkv (or .m4v container, doesn't matter but the program I use to remux the sound tracks in can use both) and just do that for all the episodes and let it run. For Band of Brothers which has 45-60minute episodes it took about 20-35minutes to run each encode with other apps running on my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 8gigs of RAM. Once that's done you can remux the the audio track from the low quality video encodes you just created into the files using Subler (for Mp4 containers) or Mkv toolnix (for Mkv containers). It is, admittedly, a long process but its faster than a complete re-encode. I've heard of faster methods but I find my way to be pretty easy. Alternatively if you don't need to compress the Dolby Digital, you can just take the Ac3 track out of the files stored on your computer and remux which gets rid of encoding all together.

[jaredhite1]

Thanks to both of you for the replies. I just now had some time to go through and identify which movies I care about the surround sound on, so I'll try all of your suggestions and hopefully one will work out. Thanks again.