I'm trying to find the pro's and cons of using AC3 audio or WAV audio when encoding my XVID's. It appears obvious that AC3 is better quality sound so I would expect it to take more space. However in the little bit of playing I've done using DVD2AVI to extract the same audio to both formats it appears the WAV files are a fair bit bigger than AC3. Does anyone know if this will hold true in the final AVI?
WAV files (in general) are uncompressed, so if you intend to multiplex plain WAV to AVI, it will take about 650MB per 74 minutes in stereo at 44.1kHz. You probably don't want that. The biggest benefit from AC3 is the discrete 5.1 encoding. If you don't need that, you can save some space by encoding the audio to eg. MP3 format.
