[MPlayer-users] Demuxing without decoding?

[ullli]

Hello!

I just managed to install MPlayer with the help of a friend (I am a
Linux-Newbie, and for the time being only run it as a virtual machine
in a laptop under XP... *^%&$*"£&^ ) and now that it works I actually
wonder about one thing I am hoping to find an answer for here:

I installed MPlayer to rip the audio from my DVDs to listen to some
concerts while driving or walking in the park etc. Obviously I would
like to have a good quality of sound to satisfy all environments. Now I
don't know much about computers but I know a little bit about
compression and I know that second or third generations of coding and
decoding don't do the signal much good. What I would like to know is
whether MPlayer is actually just demuxing the streams from the DVD
when told to dump the stream to ac3 or whether it decodes and then
recodes it on the way? If the latter were the case I'd rather rip it to
wav-files, but if not, then I am obviously happy to dump the ac3 and
then extract the stereo mpeg signal form there (ooops - is that
possible? ac3 is new to me as well...)

Well, I would be very gratefulfor any lights shone on these slightly chaotic questions!

heers,
ullli