Ripping and Playing movie files with AC3 audio in Quicktime and Front Row

[Tom Moreno]

Hi all you fellow Mac users that might be out there,

So I've got a MacBook Pro with OSX 10.5.7, iTunes 8.2.1, QT 7.6.2, and Front Row 1.0 connected to my Denon AVR-3808 via the mini-Toslink and a DVI-HDMI cable. I have encoded some video files off of DVD using Handbrake utilising the AppleTV .m4v standard with dual audio tracks (1 AAC stereo mixdown, 2 AC3 Passthrough). I've then installed Perian (first 1.1.3, but now running the 1.1.4 beta) and did the whole "defaults write com.cod3r.a52codec attemptPassthrough 1" unix command to enable the passing of AC3 to the optical port after setting the digital output to 48KHz.

Now when I copy the movie into my iTunes database, when the movie is playing I can select the audio tracks menu from the playback bar and switch to the Surround track and my AVR lights up with Dolby Digital and the relevant channel lights come on screen, but when using either QT or Frontrow I'm still only getting stereo PCM sound. And it's only reading the first 2-channel track (I can tell because on one of my movies I accidentally encoded the commentary track as the stereo track which turned out to be very helpful in debugging) and not even attempting to read the secondary 5.1 track. I even installed the Sapphire Front Row Plugin to see if getting that to do the AC3 passthrough would work and no dice- the exact same result.

I'm a bit of a mac head as I sort them out for a living, but this is the first time I've tried to delve into the waters of turning a machine into a full service HTPC incorporating codecs beyond the standard quicktime set. So the question is, do any of you have this set up correctly and working that might be able to throw me a couple of pointers? Most of the info's up on the web seem to be about 6 months out of date and you get the feeling that AC3 passthrough might be generally broke in QT 7.6.x, is this the case or have some of you managed to break down the walls?

 

[John Duncan]

No, I've only ripped them (illegally, but for research purposes) to native VOB files and played them through Front Row - and even then am only playing in stereo anyway, not trying to feed a receiver. So I'm no help

. But I'm curious as to why you're doing the conversion, unless for space reasons? I'd have thought that would be a more foolproof way of identifying whether the machine is streaming the 5.1 soundtrack?

 

[Tom Moreno]

JohnDuncan:No, I've only ripped them (illegally, but for research purposes) to native VOB files and played them through Front Row - and even then am only playing in stereo anyway, not trying to feed a receiver. So I'm no help

. But I'm curious as to why you're doing the conversion, unless for space reasons? I'd have thought that would be a more foolproof way of identifying whether the machine is streaming the 5.1 soundtrack?

Well the gist of it is that I want to set up some sort of media centre type system in my living room and am looking at options of either an aTV or a Mac Mini and am leaning a bit more towards the Mac Mini for a few reasons (not least of which that current aTV hardware is limited to a maximum 720p output resolution), but the only way I want to go down the route of the Mac Mini is knowing that I can get full digital surround out of it via the optical connection. I've got quite a few DVD's on the shelf that I'd like to load into said media server so the space premium that I could get an average DVD into a 2 GB m4v file with good resolution as opposed to 5-6 GB for the TS Folder rips would help.

 

[John Duncan]

I thought my @TV played at least 1080i, but wouldn't swear on it...

However, for video streaming (as opposed to music), and if you can afford it, I'd very much go with a Mini for flexibility rather than @TV (far too much faffing to get the @TV to play vanilla VOB files).

Again, I'm very aware that I'm not being much help since have not attempted what you are trying to do, but one last thing for you to consider - if you can get it to work in iTunes, why does it matter if it doesn't work in QT or FR?

 

[Tom Moreno]

JohnDuncan:but one last thing for you to consider - if you can get it to work in iTunes, why does it matter if it doesn't work in QT or FR?

Therein lies the rub, iTunes on the telly with a keyboard or mouse might suffice for me- but getting it all to work and being able to access all the media goodness via the apple remote and Front Row's slick interface would make it wife-compatible 1.2a.

I had installed boxxee on my mac a couple of months ago to have a look at it and while I could find my way around it, it got a bunch of frowns from she who controls. I'm going to have a look at PLEX as this seems to be popular and appears to have AC3 and DTS bitstream support but I'm wary of it's ability to access my music library as I have meticulously built a tagged iTunes library that has a mix of Apple Lossless and Protected AAC files along with the more run of the mill stuff. It does seem that you can link between PLEX and FR via a FR plugin so you could theoretically swap between the two for film/music enjoyment but again- how slick this is will have to be seen.

 

[Tom Moreno]

I've found the absolute ultimate HTPC software for mac!!! Plex is absolutely amazing. The interface is much slicker than anything I've seen to-date, it does full lookup of films and tv shows via any number of online resources, integrates beautifully with your iTunes database so there's no need to re-catalogue your music (though you can as well if you want to utilise it's more flushed out library functions), it's got its own Harmony remote profile online so you aren't limited to the functionality of the Apple remote, and there's even a plugin to launch it from the Front Row interface so you can use them with each other.

All I can say is wow. It's got great tech specs too. It does fully unhindered passthrough of Dolby Digital and DTS bitstreams via the optical output. For video playback there's loads of options for tweaking the de-interlacing format and upscaling algorythms, and when you've had a play you can save from the menu inside playback a default setup for all future videos- but if you have a tweak of any setting (video processing, audio track/subtitle selection, video zoom (for those non-anamorphic dvds) it saves it with that particular file so you don't have to tweak it again.

And... It's got an "App Store" (why it's called that I don't know because there's not a single pay-for item in there) where officially checked plugins by 3rd party developers add functionality of Youtube, BBC iPlayer, 4OD etc. into the interface. It also claims to automatically pull HD streams when available. I can say I've never seen Youtube displayed so well on my 32" screen before.

Only problem now is that I'm going to have to buy a mac mini to build a fully flushed out htmac system now that I've found the ultimate software to drive it.

 

[John Duncan]

Cool. And tbh, not much wrong with a mac mini (apart from the price). I guess there's no Plex for my @TV though...

 

[Tom Moreno]

Unfortunately it doesn't look like there's a Plex for ATV. It's a pretty all-encompassing piece of software so I'm not sure how they would implement it if they wanted to port it to ATV.

 

[John Duncan]

Well @TV OS is pretty much OSX in disguise, though having said that my atvflash install didn't really do what it was supposed to, in terms of being able to install apps on it...