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Topic: Dolby Digital (ffmpeg or otherwise) vs. Dolby Digital Plus at a higher bitrate (Read 1983 times) previous topic - next topic
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Dolby Digital (ffmpeg or otherwise) vs. Dolby Digital Plus at a higher bitrate

The reason I'm asking this is that I wanted a method to be able to listen to surround sound music straight on my TV. With my testing, I figured out that 1024 kb/s was the highest possible bitrate that would be decoded via ARC. Whether this is down to the TV or my receiver is unknown at the time, but yes, it is ridiculous considering the bitrate of uncompressed stereo sound and DTS, unless maybe Dolby Digital Plus is more intensive to decode at a higher bitrate? But then it would be the same whether it would be coming through ARC or not, obviously I haven't tested this though.

Anyway, the other thing I haven't tested is properly A/B testing any of this, but as far as I could tell they are basically indistinguishable. I would like to test this more properly to see if I can actually tell the difference but otherwise I would like a rule of thumb for this. The reason I included the "otherwise" is that sometimes regular Dolby Digital is already included with whatever I'm trying to listen to, and I suppose that could happen for Dolby Digital Plus as well at a lower bitrate than what I'd be encoding to, and obviously their encoder would have to be better than the FOSS alternative, but I'm unsure which would actually come out on top.

Just to be clear here, using DTS isn't an option because my receiver has problems with decoding streams encoded with dcaenc have the frequently-noted distortion problems, and I don't think the encoder is particularly performant anyway, but if I happen to have a DTS stream available, either at 768 or 1536 kb/s, I would like to know how this would compare with the other variants as well.

One last thing to clarify is that, of course, I have a lossless version of the audio as well, otherwise there'd be no point in reencoding it. It just so happened that the lossless version also was uncompressed, which means that it's not backwards compatible in any form, but I did realise then that I had lossy versions available as well.