When i am slimming down a blu-ray movie using TsMuxer some movies have LPCM and some have hd audio. the question i have is, if i only leave in LPCM or HD audio (take out the ac3 5.1), will the receiver down convert it to play even if it does not support hd audio? the reason i ask is, when watching an original Blu-ray disc the surround seemed a lot clearer, than one where i took out all the hd audio and left in the ac3 5.1. it got me thinking that maybe it played the hd or LPCM audio but down converted it in the original hence the better sound, or is it all in my head.
How HD audio on BD work is; there is a core track, typically AC3 @ 640kb/s, or DTS @ 1536kb/s, with HD data attatched to each channel. If your receiver doesn't support HD or LPCM audio it will play the core track. It's kinda different for LPCM, there is no core, it's just one massive audio file that needs to be decoded by an HD audio receiver, if that HD audio signal is sent to the receiver that cannot decode it properly you will either get a 2.0 channel effect or no sound at all. To summarize, TrueHD and DTS HD-MA is OK to keep when slimming down, LPCM is not OK... or if you include two audio track, perhaps a AC3 and a LPCM, but then you are consuming an astronomical amount of disc space with LPCM. Another thing to consider is tsMuxeR doesn't mux TrueHD properly, you'll get no sound. You need to mux first using tsmuxeR to m2ts, then mux that file using tsremux (to Blu-ray). EDIT: If your receiver is optical only (no HDMI) and you try to send a HD audio stream through it only the core track will be sent from the BD player to the receiver. LPCM, only the right and left channel will be sent, giving the 2.0 effect.
my receiver (sony STR-DG510) does support HDMI but im sure it does not support hd surround, at the moment its connected through optical not hdmi. Also when using TsMuxer and you select DTS-HD it gives you the option to down convert to just DTS would this work ok when playing the movie?
It would appear that the HDMI function on your receiver is only passthrough (up to 1080i only), so if your TV supports 1080p I suggest you do not use the HDMI passthrough on your receiver. If you chose to down convert the DTS HD to DTS it will strip away the HD data leaving only the core, which will play fine through the optical. This applies to TrueHD as well. However, if you are burning to blank Blu-rays I suggest keeping the HD audio, this way if you do upgrade your receiver you'll still have the best audio possible... and for now you will still get surround through the optical in your current setup... just not HD audio.
thanks for that, you have cleared it up for me, i will be leaving in the hd audio as long as the movie fits onto a 25gb disk
