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Topic: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac (Read 3184 times) previous topic - next topic
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Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

I have a number of music DVDs - live concerts such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_at_the_Beacon_Theatre_(James_Taylor_video_album) that I want to rip the audio from so I can listen to just the music.
These are DVD-Video discs and usually contain two audio streams. For example, the one above has
- LPCM (48kMHz, 24bit 2 Ch)
- AC3 (48kHZ 6Ch)

I'm intending to encode to flac, I think the LPCM one above would encode nicely to a 24bit flac stereo recoding and play back in stereo straightforwardly.  I don't currently use a 6 Channel setup, have in the past, might in the future.

The question is what to do from an archiving strategy. I'm putting all the DVDs in a storage box .
The options seem to be:
- just rip and encode the 6Ch stream. Rely on the flac player to handle 2ch or 6ch output. Is the possible?
- rip and encode both to separate files
- just rip and encode the 2Ch stream for now

Thoughts?
Dpr

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #1 –
The LPCM is lossless so encode to flac. The AC3 is lossy, the best way to store it is verbatim as AC3.

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #2 –
It is possible to get everything into a Matroska. With or without FLACing the LPCM.
The audio can then be played back with e.g. foobar2000. But stream selection - to switch between 2ch and 6ch - might drive you nuts, YMMV.

I don't have that many music DVDs, yet still many enough for the whole thing (with video) to require a separate hard drive, so I wanted to go for the following strategy:
* Rip the DVD to an ISO image. Any LPCM remains uncompressed. Sure it wastes space, but since they are on a separate drive and that is not nearly full, that wasn't much of an issue.
* Extract "foobar2000-friendly" stereo streams and get them into my audio library as if they were ordinary live albums. (Compress the LPCMs.)

However ... that job was a bitch. Metadata sources didn't know the DVD "chapters" (that would go as separate chapters/tracks in the Matroska files) and taggers are generally more happy with one file per track than one image per album.
I don't know if that situation has become any better, but in the end I would just play the DVD images.
Or to be honest, just rarely play the DVD images, because they don't show up in my fb2k library.

I have once voiced some fb2k wishlist item: a component that reads DVDs in .iso and interacts nicely with an external tagger component (used to be m-tags, but later I use foo_external_tags for that purpose). But, until there is a nice automatic way to populate the tags, ...
... there might be? I haven't checked in a few years.

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #3 –
Quote from: cid42 on
The LPCM is lossless so encode to flac. The AC3 is lossy, the best way to store it is verbatim as AC3.

Thanks for the response
24bit flac or 16bit for this example?

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Porcus on
Metadata sources didn't know the DVD "chapters" (that would go as separate chapters/tracks in the Matroska files) and taggers are generally more happy with one file per track than one image per album.
I don't know if that situation has become any better, but in the end I would just play the DVD images.
Or to be honest, just rarely play the DVD images, because they don't show up in my fb2k library.

I have once voiced some fb2k wishlist item: a component that reads DVDs in .iso and interacts nicely with an external tagger component (used to be m-tags, but later I use foo_external_tags for that purpose). But, until there is a nice automatic way to populate the tags, ...
... there might be? I haven't checked in a few years.

I’ve been using an eval copy of https://www.dvdae.com/ which does have its own chapter database. You can make a query for metadata and it shows the available choices. For the James Taylor one above, there’s about 5 choices. You can also edit the chapter list and upload it. Pretty basic compared to things like musicbrainz but it works for dvds

Any other recommendations for tools appreciated.
I’m heading for separate libraries, one for audio and music dvds

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #5 –
Quote from: dpr on
24bit flac or 16bit for this example?
You stated it was 24 bits ... ? I don't know the DVD in question, but AFAIK, LPCM in DVD-video is either 16 or 24, never 20. (DVD-Audio is different, and DVD-Audio can also contain some video material ... )

But anyway, if the resolution is actually lower and the l(e)ast bits are all zeroed out, then FLAC can compress that with insignificant size penalty (so-called "wasted bits").
You can of course reduce resolution yourself in a lossy manner, but then you can consider a lossy codec.


Quote from: dpr on
I’ve been using an eval copy of https://www.dvdae.com/ which does have its own chapter database.
Interesting. Does it work on pre-"ripped" .ISO files?

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Porcus on
Quote from: dpr on
24bit flac or 16bit for this example?
You stated it was 24 bits ... ? I don't know the DVD in question, but AFAIK, LPCM in DVD-video is either 16 or 24, never 20. (DVD-Audio is different, and DVD-Audio can also contain some video material ... )

But anyway, if the resolution is actually lower and the l(e)ast bits are all zeroed out, then FLAC can compress that with insignificant size penalty (so-called "wasted bits").
You can of course reduce resolution yourself in a lossy manner, but then you can consider a lossy codec.

Sorry, I wasn’t clear in my question. The dvd has LPCM (48kMHz, 24bit 2 Ch), which @cid42 says is lossless, so using dvdae, I can rip and encode straight to flac at 48kMHZ at 24 bits or 16. I see no reason to loose resolution and go to 16 bits in the flac. Am I correct?


Quote from: dpr on
I’ve been using an eval copy of https://www.dvdae.com/ which does have its own chapter database.
Interesting. Does it work on pre-"ripped" .ISO files?


Yes.

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #7 –
I would keep both tracks in case you ever want the surround.    (The 5.1 downmix usually isn't exactly the same.)   I have about 100 concert DVDs and I enjoy the surround sound.

The LPCM on most DVDs is 16-bits.   A 24-bit uncompressed file will be 50% bigger and similarly a 24-bit FLAC will be about 50% bigger than a 16-bit FLAC but it's not as predictable.    (A 24-bit FLAC made from a 16-bit original will be the same size as a 16-bit FLAC._

The AC3 & DTS tracks are lossy and they don't have a "bit depth."     I don't know that much about those formats but MP3 actually has more dynamic range than a 16-bit WAV.

I have full audio/video "backups" on a hard drive in the original DVD format so I use DVD-player software to play them, and I made MP3s for most of them.    I usually make a full concert file plus separate files for each song. 

The individual tracks require some manual editing...   I like a short fade-up of the applause/crowd noise at the beginning and a longer applause fade-out at the end.   For the full-concert MP3, I'll also edit-out "excess talking" or gaps between songs and "splice" with a crossfade of the crowd noise so it doesn't sound edited.

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #8 –
If you use audio extractor don't convert de ac3 or dts at all.
Foobar will play it anyways. V2.0 even without plug-ins

You'll get files with extensions ac3 and dts. Nice and clean.


Ac3 is the lowest possible quality. Then dts. Select the lpcm tracks if there. Lpcm can be converted to mchflac . Don't resample.

Atmos or dts:x tracks can not be played with foobar. If you convert those to flac you loose the top audio information. If there, select the 5.1 or 7.1 tracks. Don't ever downsample from atmos to 5.1.

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #9 –
Hi
maybe it's off topic
but i have some music dvds , what do you think about DVD Audio Extractor  ?
I guess it's the only dvd audio ripper
thanks

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #10 –
Quote from: francesco on
Hi
maybe it's off topic
but i have some music dvds , what do you think about DVD Audio Extractor  ?
I guess it's the only dvd audio ripper
thanks
I'm very pleased with it.

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #11 –
Quote from: dpr on
I can rip and encode straight to flac at 48kMHZ at 24 bits or 16. I see no reason to loose resolution and go to 16 bits in the flac. Am I correct?
That's what I would do - I rip without additional processing myself, and if it is 24 bits I keep it as 24 bits.
Of course, "no reason to" is ... depending on what hard drive usage you see as "reason to" reduce resolution and file size.

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #13 –
You can also give Xmedia Recode (MS Windows) a try. The audio extraction functionality is rather basic, but it is completely free (as in beer).
 

Re: Rip Music DVDs to 2 channel or 6 channel with flac

Reply #14 –
Quote from: zordaz on
You can also give Xmedia Recode (MS Windows) a try. The audio extraction functionality is rather basic, but it is completely free (as in beer).
VLC and Handbrake are also free tools which can rip a DVD and even convert the audio (and the video) on the fly.