AC3 to AAC advice

[bashar_mc]

Hello,
I am a noob in DVD Ripping and i want to Rip some i own just to throw them away because of space reasons and place the resulting Videos on a Media Server.

All are AC3 5.1(48kHz) 384kbs
I can do AC3 Passthru and everything works ok but i found out that some Android devices do not want to play because the audio track is AC3
If I change to AAC everything works.

Now here is the question:
In Handbreak what is the correct setting to encode AC3 5.1(48kHz) 384kbs into AAC(avcodec)?
What is the correct Bitrate? 384kbs like the original AC3?
What is the correct mix? 5.1 ? Dolby Pro Logic II ? Dolby Surround?

Because I want to throw away the DVDs I will Rip them with all audio tracks and subtitles cause if i want to ever get back to them, to have something decent to work on(maybe re-encoding in a different video format in the future as technology evolves and players aren't compatible anymore with old formats etc) so i would like to preserve the audio track as close to the original, not to lose to much quality.

thx in advance

[hello_hello]

I'm not sure Android ever supported AC3 as such, but you can install a player that does. Apparently Dolby started going after developers of non-free players or players that have paid versions (for licence fees), but there's free players that support AC3. For example,
VLC https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.videolan.vlc
AC3 Player https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=nppl3.hd.video.player

My favourite player removed AC3 support from it's free version a fair while ago, but you can install a separate codec for decoding AC3 yourself.
MX Player: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mxtech.videoplayer.ad
Custom codecs: https://forum.xda-developers.com/apps/mx-player/mx-player-custom-codec-dts-support-t2156254

You can keep the original AC3 and convert it to AAC too. It won't make the files all that much bigger unless there's several audio tracks. I thought that's what Handbrake did by default but I don't use it so maybe I'm remembering wrong.

If you want to keep the original video quality too, you can rip DVDs with MakeMKV. It doesn't re-encode. It just puts everything in an MKV container.