Dolby Digital Stereo?

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One of the kids' DVDs I ripped last night to put into iTunes is in Dolby Digital Stereo... Not Pro Logic II....

Which I thought was really strange...

From what I could research it seems to be some sort of compression format? Like mp3?

So when I did ac3 passthrough it plays fine via appletv 2 and Denon 1610 avr to tv but on QuickTime via computer I get loads of digital noise...

Which seems kinda silly for a format that is supposed to save space on discs and play on loads of things...

Should I just rip to stereo 320kbps? There is no surround sound data/instructions in this format anyway?
 
Do you have the AC3 codec installed on the computer? If not, then you will only get static/noise. ATV passes the audio as bitstream to your amp with has an AC3 decoder built in, which is why you get correct sound
 
Matt_C said:
Do you have the AC3 codec installed on the computer? If not, then you will only get static/noise. ATV passes the audio as bitstream to your amp with has an AC3 decoder built in, which is why you get correct sound

Thanks, yeah not worried about playing this stuff on computer... It's the kids' tv show tv series... Just putting stuff into iTunes for appletv as the kids destroy DVDs....

Was trying to figure out if it's just bog standard stereo format or if there is any surround encoding in it...

It sounds interesting on appletv as ac3 passthrough....

All I could get from Dolby website was that it's "a great way to fit more video on DVD"
 
Well what does it say on the back of the DVD box? Dolby Stereo or Dolby Surround?
 
Dobly Digital is also known as AC-3 and can have different channel configurations from 1.0 to 7.1.
You need the same DD/AC-3 decoder regardless of the number of channels.
 
Matt_C said:
Well what does it say on the back of the DVD box? Dolby Stereo or Dolby Surround?

It says Dolby Digital and then on the back it has the square with a solid block on the top left and right corners which I guess means stereo?

I would have thought stereo is just called stereo? Then when I went to Dolby website they just went on about how exciting Dolby digital stereo is yet where extremely vague on is it actually just stereo... Argh...

I'm guessing now that it's just stereo but using the Dolby stuff to do some kind of compression so audio takes less space on DVD?

But of course I'm not 100% sure...
 
Yes, the square with solid blocks in the top two corners denotes stereo. A square with three solid blocks along the top, another two in the bottom two corners and one in the middle denotes 5.1.

Dolby Stereo is stereo, although I think Pro Logic can be encoded into the stereo channels that a Pro Logic amp can decode. But since Dolby Surround came around in the mainstream, there really isn't a lot of requirement for Pro Logic these days, so generally it's Dolby Digital, in either Stereo or Surround format.

The idea behind Dolby is you can encode higher quality audio and compress it, as opposed to LPCM, which is massive in contrast, or MP3 which is inferior quality
 

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