Audio settings for Vidcoder

[carlmart]

It's been some time since I have parked my audio settings, on my HD conversions, onto Dolby 5.1, 640kbps and 48KHz. That choice sounds great, the file is smaller than a DTS and seems to play anywhere.

But today I am facing converting a large high bitrate mkv file, with Dolby TrueHD, 7.1 audio. The audio file is even larger than a DTS file and I will need to convert it to my settings.

My default choice for audio conversion, after trying others and getting poor results, is with AvsP/Avisynth. But I don't know any Avisynth plugin that will handle TrueHD 7.1. Is there one?

As I will convert the large video file into a smaller size one, that will fit a DVD-DL capacity, I was thinking of also using Vidcoder for this conversion. But I'm not sure what choice to pick. What would suggest for 5.1 highest quality and best transparency?

[Lowlander]

As far as I've used Vidcoder, there are just four choices for transcoding (i.e. NOT passing through the original) multichannel audio: AAC, AC3, Vorbis and FLAC.

AC3 may the only one of those that doesn't offer 7.1 and I can't say if Vidcoder is able to downmix 7.1. to 5.1 correctly, but I would definitely give your proven audio format of AC3 5.1 640kbps and 48KHz a try and listen carefully to the results. My second choice would be AAC, but not if you still want your stuff to "play anywhere".

[redwudz]

You might try RipBot instead. I have used it to convert large MKV files to ones that would fit on a DL DVD disk. And I also use AC3 640K 5.1 settings for audio. For good fit on a DL disk, I use a custom output size of 7900 and two pass encoding and they fit perfectly with great quality. I use VidCoder only for DVD>MKV conversions.

[carlmart]

OK. I'm giving the whole file a try with Vidcoder, audio and all, as we speak. Let's hope it does a fine job.

In any case, I wonder if it's possible to process the TrueHD audio separately with the Nicaudio plugin in Avisynth. How do I load it, because it's not AC3 file or any other type mentioned on the specs?

About using Ripbot, thanks for the suggestion, but I haven't had good luck with when I tried it. Vidcoder has become more or less my trusted converter of choice for video, as AvsP + Nicaudio has been for audio conversions.

I would like to get back to use eac3to + GUI, but something seems to be happening that prevents me from it. A tutorial for it might help, if there's any.

[redwudz]

There's this tutorial for eac3to, but you may already be familiar with it: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Eac3to/How_to_Use