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Topic: Eac3 vs Mp2 Question (Read 3188 times) previous topic - next topic
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Eac3 vs Mp2 Question


Hello, Guys I just want to ask a question, There is a Tv Distributor In my country who have special boxes For Broadcast.

The Boxes Audio Codecs are ( Eac3/ac3/mp2) and the distributor use (Mp2) 192kb For stereo and (Eac3) 192kb for 5.1 Multi-Channel.


The Question is Why this provider doesn't use (Eac3) For stereo as it's a better Codec with the same bitrate Could Give better Quality?

Thanks in Advance 

Re: Eac3 vs Mp2 Question

Reply #1 –
Compatibility and availability, transcoding doesn't improve the audio quality. Also not everyone will use the current generation of the receiver and can't decode the newest codec available. I mean, colour TV was developed in a way so that black and white TV sets still could be used and the colour was an addon which would be ignored by older TV sets. I'm still amazed how well that worked.

Re: Eac3 vs Mp2 Question

Reply #2 –
I think it is because they probably already receive the audio as MP2 from somewhere and transcoding it to a different format will likely just decrease the quality.
Another possibility is that they tested with certain boxes and it wasn't able to decode stereo EAC3, but were able to decode multi-channel EAC3 correctly.

Re: Eac3 vs Mp2 Question

Reply #3 –
Because for stereo MP2 is transparent at 192 ~ 256kbps. Also, it the same codec where musepack came from and it being subband it should be robust to issues affecting MP3 & AAC/Vorbis/opus.
Got locked out on a password i didn't remember. :/

Re: Eac3 vs Mp2 Question

Reply #4 –
They probably have better MP2 encoders than what we have available.
I tried libtwolame a few years ago at different bitrates and only a few songs did sound transparent at 192Kbps.
ffmpeg's internal MP2 encoder only starts sounding decent at >= 320Kbps for stereo content.
The Musepack encoder is much better than the MP2 encoders what we have available.
ffmpeg's internal AC3 encoder sounds decent enough at >= 160kbps. Better than the MP2 encoders.

Re: Eac3 vs Mp2 Question

Reply #5 –
Quote from: LithosZA on
They probably have better MP2 encoders than what we have available.

The free MP2 encoders are mainly the demonstration code with some fixes, just like BladeMP3 was. MP2 was designed to reach transparency at 256 kb/s and above, so the often used 192 are sometimes on the low end of transparency.
IIRC for two channels AC3 is not really superior to MP2, except for channel coupling (joint stereo) which was always solved quite bad in MP2.