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[RussellS]

Hi, I have the Beatles Love album which consists of two discs. One is a standard CD which I have ripped and is in my MC library. However the other disc is a DVD-Audio disc which contains the album in three different versions.

PCM Stereo
Dolby Digital 5.1
DTS 5.1

What I want to know is what should I do with this album to get either of the surround sound versions into MC's library. Should I just rip it as a DVD and put it in the movie library or can I somehow rip it as Audio only and put it in the music library but retain the AC3 or DTS encoding and pass over optical to the AV amp to get 5.1 playback.


Thanks

[6233638]

Media Center does not have native support for DVD-A files.
What I used was foobar2000 with the DVD-Audio decoder, which let me rip my discs to FLAC files.

[RussellS]

Media Center does not have native support for DVD-A files.
What I used was foobar2000 with the DVD-Audio decoder, which let me rip my discs to FLAC files.

Ah, ok. Thanks for that.
Do the resulting Flac files retain the 5.1 audio then and, if so, how is that then transfered to the amp.

[6233638]

Ah, ok. Thanks for that.
Do the resulting Flac files retain the 5.1 audio then and, if so, how is that then transfered to the amp.

Yes, the plugin will let you select the tracks you want to convert, so if the disc contains stereo and 5.1 tracks, you will have the option of stereo, surround, and a downmix from the surround.
 
Converted files will play back just like any other in Media Center.

[RussellS]

Yes, the plugin will let you select the tracks you want to convert, so if the disc contains stereo and 5.1 tracks, you will have the option of stereo, surround, and a downmix from the surround.
 
Converted files will play back just like any other in Media Center.

Thanks very much. I'll give that a go.

[RussellS]

That worked a treat, thanks.

I must admit I didn't understand the structure of a DVD-A disc. There were actually 4 different versions of the album on the disc. There were PCM 2ch and PCM 6ch versions which were on the DVD-Audio part of the disc and then there were DTS 5.1 and AC3 5.1 encoded versions which were on the DVD-Video part of the disc. It was this that was confusing me. So I have copied the PCM 2ch & PCM 6ch versions off the disc using Foobar2000. Unfortunately, at the moment, I cannot listen to the 6ch version in full 96khz 24bit PCM glory as I only have an optical S/PDIF link between my PC and AV amp (S/PDIF only supports 2ch's) so I can either listen to the 2ch in 96khz 24bit PCM or let MC convert the 6ch PCM to AC3. Either way it is better than my old MP3 version of the album ripped from the CD.

I've learned something today so thanks for educating me.