Hi
I have a fairly old but stable system running 7MC for all my media and I'm using S/PDIF pass-through to an amp that handles all my DD/DTS and for everything else I leave the amp on Dolby PLII to get pseudo-surround for live TV and bog standard AVI downloads. During the course of setting up my machine I found that AC3filter can encode PCM on the fly to DD and as I've never been happy with MP3s with PLII and I'm too lazy to cycle my amp through its 10 sound types to get to standard Stereo (there's no shortcut) I'd like to encode my MP3s to 2.1 or 5.1 on the fly. The main reason being that in AC3Filter I have finer control of the encoding including redirecting the low frequencies explicitly to my subwoofer and get a much richer sound than my amp's PLII gives me. Arguments about lossy to lossy and all that aside (I'm no audiophile), this is what I want to achieve.
So, I tried using AC3filter on its own and it mucked up the pass-through of DD/DTS in my MKV files, it started re-encoding the audio in those to 5.1 too rather than just passing it through and I couldn't see a way of tweaking the settings to avoid that. It seems that AC3Filter can't handle MP3s itself, it takes over once the MP3 stream has been decoded by whatever codec and comes into AC3Filter as PCM. There is an option under the "Use AC3 encoder" checkbox for "Do not encode stereo PCM" which is the exact opposite of what I want. I want "Only encode stereo PCM". Is there a way to achieve this?
One solution I thought of would be to use ffdshow for the AC3/DTS passthrough and use AC3Filter for PCM only but I'm not sure how or where to set the merits to achieve this combo. Something like this:
AC3/DTS - ffdshow
PCM - AC3Filter
MPEG2 - Media Foundation (or ffdshow/AC3Filter, don't think I care, if it's AC3Filter I guess I'd get 5.1 on Live/Recorded TV too?)
Could somebody give me some help on setting this up please?
Thanks
slink
I have a fairly old but stable system running 7MC for all my media and I'm using S/PDIF pass-through to an amp that handles all my DD/DTS and for everything else I leave the amp on Dolby PLII to get pseudo-surround for live TV and bog standard AVI downloads. During the course of setting up my machine I found that AC3filter can encode PCM on the fly to DD and as I've never been happy with MP3s with PLII and I'm too lazy to cycle my amp through its 10 sound types to get to standard Stereo (there's no shortcut) I'd like to encode my MP3s to 2.1 or 5.1 on the fly. The main reason being that in AC3Filter I have finer control of the encoding including redirecting the low frequencies explicitly to my subwoofer and get a much richer sound than my amp's PLII gives me. Arguments about lossy to lossy and all that aside (I'm no audiophile), this is what I want to achieve.
So, I tried using AC3filter on its own and it mucked up the pass-through of DD/DTS in my MKV files, it started re-encoding the audio in those to 5.1 too rather than just passing it through and I couldn't see a way of tweaking the settings to avoid that. It seems that AC3Filter can't handle MP3s itself, it takes over once the MP3 stream has been decoded by whatever codec and comes into AC3Filter as PCM. There is an option under the "Use AC3 encoder" checkbox for "Do not encode stereo PCM" which is the exact opposite of what I want. I want "Only encode stereo PCM". Is there a way to achieve this?
One solution I thought of would be to use ffdshow for the AC3/DTS passthrough and use AC3Filter for PCM only but I'm not sure how or where to set the merits to achieve this combo. Something like this:
AC3/DTS - ffdshow
PCM - AC3Filter
MPEG2 - Media Foundation (or ffdshow/AC3Filter, don't think I care, if it's AC3Filter I guess I'd get 5.1 on Live/Recorded TV too?)
Could somebody give me some help on setting this up please?
Thanks
slink