[MPlayer-users] DTS audio question -- perhaps off topic

[Vladimir Mosgalin]

Hi The Wanderer!

 On 2005.04.26 at 18:00:06 -0400, The Wanderer wrote next:

> >I'm trying to figure out how to take a DTS Audio CD and re-encode it
> >to a multichannel ogg file.  I was thinking MPlayer could read DTS
> >Audio off DVDs and down mux it or whatever for two speakers, I was
> >curious if It could read DTS Audio CDs and perhaps re-encode to
> >multi-channel ogg?  I'm guessing no, but it never hurts to ask I
> >think :-)
> 
> No, it can't do that, not directly anyway. (MEncoder is a video encoder,
> not an audio encoder, and MPlayer can (aside from playback) only either
> dump the unaltered stream or output it to a PCM/WAV file.) The best you
> could get is to either use 'mplayer -dumpaudio' to get the audio stream

Using -dumpaudio is wrong here; dts audio cd is like normal cd. Use
cdparanoia to rip audio tracks from it. You'll be able to play resulting
files with dtsdec and mplayer. As about re-encoding, probably no - both
of them will play it, but won't be able to re-encode or decode it to
multi-channel pcm stream. In theory, dtsdec is able to do that, but that
part is broken, you'll only get a noise.

You can, however, re-encode main stereo channels (since stereo output
works correctly), but that's probably not what you want.

The complete instructions
cdparanoia 5 track5.wav  - rip it
dtsdec track5.wav  - play resulting wav dts file
mplayer track5.wav  - ditto, but due to bug in mplayer (?) you'll only
get stereo channels
mplayer cdda://5 -rawaudio on:format=0x2001  - the same, access cd directly
dtsdec -o wav track5.wav > stereo5.wav  - you'll get stereo pcm file
dtsdec -o wavX  - broken

dtsdec have problems with some streams, or can even crash, so don't be
surprised.

Actually, now I checked and dtsdec output stereo track by default.. But
I remember that I was able to get 6-channels output on playback somehow,
but couldn't save it into pcm wav file.

If you really want to transcode dts track, you can also try vlc (but I
had no luck with it) or do it in windows (though it isn't easy too,
there is a working set of tools that does the work).

-- 

Vladimir