Question about ripping BluRay disks

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

Hi all. For a while now I have been ripping Bluray disks to my computer and then using Handbrake to create compressed versions, all of this for my main home theater room.

I have always used the highest quality audio available on the MKV file, be it DTS HD MA, Dolby True HD, etc. I have never put any secondary audio files in the MKV’s. Probably short sighted :frowning:

At any rate, now I am realizing that I want to put boxes in other room of the house that won’t have home theater setups in them. Therefore no hardware to pass thru the audio to.

I am assuming that if I play an MKV that only has, say, a DTS HD MA audio track, on a system that doesn’t support DTS, that I won’t get any sound.

But I don’t want to reencode my video again on hundreds of movies I’ve already ripped and created MKV’s for.

Is there a reasonable process I can follow to add a seconday audio track to the MKV’s without having to reencode the video or the existing audio track? I know Handbrake can add additional audio tracks but can it do it without reencoding the video in the mkv container?

Thanks all. I have many many tools for manipulating media files but I’m not sure which ones can do what I need.

Rob

2

The TV Live SMP can decode most multichannel formats and output them as stereo at least.  We have an SMP connected to a TV without any surround sound, and simply have the SMP’s audio set to output stereo over HDMI.  Works fine with every blu-ray rip I have tried (on the main audio track–though I rip all, because it is so little extra space).

As for your other questio, yes, you can remux your MKVs to add another audio track without having to reencode the video.  Mkvmerge can do that, for example: http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/doc/mkvmerge.html

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Thanks much! I love this forum :slight_smile: