So I'm dying to rip my copies of the two Eagles concert DVDs but they're both encoded in DTS and LPCM only -- no DD. Ergo, I can't play them over the PhotoBridge. Is there any way (perhaps with VLC) to convert the .vob's to MPEG with DD or something?

http://www.rokulabs.com/forums/viewtopi ... ght=ratdvd

I used ratDVD for this purpose

Hmmm... read through the ratDVD site and, while it may do the job, wasn't quite was I was looking for. Anyone else? Can anyone confirm that VLC will or won't convert DTS or PCM to some other Roku-readable format?

For easy one-step decoding of the audio and conversion to AC3, it works fine. Seems trying to use VLC server/client to stream and convert on the fly would be more of a hassle.

scans wrote:

For easy one-step decoding of the audio and conversion to AC3, it works fine. Seems trying to use VLC server/client to stream and convert on the fly would be more of a hassle.

From the resulting file size it looks like you must lose a lot of video quality due to the compression?

So the process would be:
1) Rip DVD with DVD Shrink
2) Use RatDVD to convert it to some other file format (which automatically decodes the DTS track into DD)
3) Use the RatDVD program to convert the file back into .VOB's

Does that sound about right? Appreciate the help.

Right. Surprisingly, the quality was actually very good after the reconversion (set to max quality on the initial conversion to the ratDVD format, and no compression in DVDShrink). It is a shame there is no easy way or utility to just convert the audio, though.

Let me know what you think of the picture quality. For me, the fact there are no audio/video sync issues is key.

scans wrote:

It is a shame there is no easy way or utility to just convert the audio, though.

BeSweet will convert the DTS to AC-3 with very high quality. Getting the DTS out and the AC-3 back in would be the harder part, but TMPGEnc MPEG Tools should be able to demux and remux if you rip the track to an MPG from the DVD's.

I've yet to find a decent tool for muxing m2v and audio tracks into a workable MPEG-2 transport stream. I bet someone in here has found something that does that gracefully though. For me, I'd like to do this sort of thing by getting the source into a multi-audio-track transport stream, and then be able to do something like a DTS to AC-3 conversion and mux the AC-3 back into the source, so then I'd have the video untouched and 3 audio tracks from which to chose in Mplay.

ImagoMPEG-Muxer works well for me.

I found a solution that I'm happy with, and as originally suspected it's with VLC. Basically I rip the disc with DVD Shrink (capturing the LPCM soundtrack), then merge the .vob files into one big one with DV Tool. I then open the single .vob with VLC and save it as a file by selecting the MPEG TS radio button. I select Audio Codec and use MPGA at 512 kbps (the highest setting it offers). The resulting file plays perfectly over the Roku and the sound is suprisingly good. My receiver defaults to Dolby Pro Logic, as I believe the sound coming from the Roku is straight 2-channel.

So... not perfect, but sufficient enough for my needs. I just really hated having to load the discs; now I have the amazing Eagles concerts at my fingertips!!!

pg_rider wrote:

(the highest setting it offers)

You might try manually entering a higher bitrate if it would be desirable. I have found that with the latest VLC for windows I can set video bitrates as high as 15360 even though the dialog box gives options for only up to 3072. The video quality is noticably better when output to mp2v transport stream file. And running through mpeg2repair afterwards does report a higher average video bitrate which with older VLC's it did not. I've noticed in most cases that VLC's encoder does NOT seem to just be padding to get higher bitrate as it isn't adding nulls and in most cases a setting of 15360 does not give a higher resulting file size than some lower rate if there's no data needing encoding to the higher rate, seems to just use as much as it needs up to the 15360 max.

I've been doing this with WMV-HD clips with very good results lately to get them in a format MPlay can play natively. If I could just get VLC to understand how to transcode 6-channel WMA into 6-channel AC-3 I'd be set, but alas no such luck yet. It can't even downmix a 6-channel WMA to a 2-channel mpga either, so any WMV-HD's with more than 2-channel sound I have to leave in WMV and use Nero or such to transcode on the fly (which needs MASSIVE PC horsepower) via UPnP.

Unknown if audio bitrates higher than 512 (which I believe is actually 256/channel for 2 channel output, not 512/channel) would give you better audio quality with the mpga output encoder but it might be worth a shot.

Good point dg. Are there "accepted" values for audio bitrates that I could try? Are they all doubles of each other? In other words, would the next values from 512 be 1024, 2048, etc?

One note on file size -- the resultant file from VLC with the "downscaled" audio was several hundred MB smaller than the original so there's definitely some loss there. It would be great to somehow keep the original fidelity, and simply do a conversion from LPCM (or DTS) into AC3...

pg_rider wrote:

Good point dg. Are there "accepted" values for audio bitrates that I could try? Are they all doubles of each other? In other words, would the next values from 512 be 1024, 2048, etc?

One note on file size -- the resultant file from VLC with the "downscaled" audio was several hundred MB smaller than the original so there's definitely some loss there. It would be great to somehow keep the original fidelity, and simply do a conversion from LPCM (or DTS) into AC3...

I have found no documentation (only made a cursory search though) of "accepted" values. For video, I just tried out various multiples of 1024. 1024*15 was the max that made any difference in mp2v output from a WMVHD video.

I haven't played with audio much.