Wd live won't play AAC audio

  1. Is your problem – Handbrake won’t work properly without an audio track.  Rerip again to get the original.

I tried your method with another HD movie and it worked perfectly.  No audio / video lag, and played back very good through the WD Live.  I set Handbrake to encode at 9000 Kbits, which suprisingly yeilded only a 6 gig file.  I’m shooting for a 10gig file.  With your experience encoding/transcoding, what Kbit will provide the best quality around 10gigs.  Also if I choose the “RF” setting in Handbrake, which number do you recommend.  I was going to run a test with “19”, but instead of wasting processing time I thought I would ask. 

Also, with this movie, I tried the audio pass-through setting (there were 2 audio tracks) and Handbrake blew up a number of times.  When I removed the audio tracks, Handbrake encoded correctly.  I then manually entered the audio tracks using MKVMerge.  Not exactly sure why the pass-through isn’t working, but will the passthrough keep the audio exactly as it is in the M2ts file?

Don’t set a target file size.   You’re doing yourself a dis-service.

Change the R/F factor to higher numbers to get what you want.

20 is good for almost ALL content.

I’ve used 22 when file sizes get a bit too much.

Remember, when using x.264 codec, HIGHER RF is LOWER QUALITY!

Testdis wrote:

 

Also, with this movie, I tried the audio pass-through setting (there were 2 audio tracks) and Handbrake blew up a number of times.  When I removed the audio tracks, Handbrake encoded correctly.  I then manually entered the audio tracks using MKVMerge.  Not exactly sure why the pass-through isn’t working, but will the passthrough keep the audio exactly as it is in the M2ts file?

What were the tracks?  If DTS or AC3 (and you chose “DTS passthrough” or “AC3 Passthrough” accordingly) I’m not sure why it would blow up (and *how* did it blow up?).  If it did, that’s something to post on the Handbrake forums, where they can fix almost any reasonable issue.

The passthrough will passthrough the CORE audio from a DTS-HD or True-HD track.  This DTS or AC3 core is all the Live can handle in an MKV file so it doesn’t make sense to do anything else (you *can* get True-HD to work sometimes in an M2TS file but it’s such a PITA I wouldn’t bother – besides, DTS is the major audio track used anyway, and DTS-HD will *never* be supported by a hardware player).

And Tony is right – using RF of 20 for any DVD source.  You can experiment using 22 for blu-ray, and I do use this for some blus that aren’t that important (mostly comedies) but you need to check out the results because *I* can see a difference and am willing to take the size hit (using 20 instead of 22 with a blu-ray will increase the file size around 20%).

1 Like

Hey Mike.  Things are going well with my conversions.  Everything has been working great with Handbrake.  One question though.  I’ve come across a couple of Blurays, specifically Terminator 2, where the main movie is split amongst multiple mt2s files (26 files).  Is there a way first off to sort those files so I can determine the correct sequence of the movie and secondly and most importantly, can Handbrake merge/handle multiple mt2s files together?

Thanks again Mike for all your help!

John

Absolutely.  BluRay playback is controlled by PLAYLISTS. 

Many times, the Playlist points to a single M2TS file, but like you just found, it can be MANY.

There’s a program called BDINFO that can show you how the playlists are put together.

Open the BD folder you ripped to in BDINFO.  It will show you the playlists, and the LENGTH of each.

Find the one that matches the title (usually the longest playlist).

You can then load that PLAYLIST file in  tsMuxerGui, and have it mux that playlist out to a single M2TS.

From there, you can finish your workflow as before.

Excellent I’ll give it a try!  Thanks Tony

Tony’s got it covered, but let me add that Disney titles (the usual culprits with this) add a further level of confusion in that there will often be three or four playlists for the main movie which differ only by a couple of M2TS files.  This is how they handle foreign language versions – to determine which version is which, play the title M2TS and see what language is displayed in English, and then use the playlist that contains this.

Hi Mike, 

I’m not sure if i’m posting in the wrong place but you were great help before so i thought i’d try again!

i’ve got a handful of mp4s and mkvs encoded with aac 6 channel audio. i know the wd tv live can output stereo aac. but i was sure i used to get 6 channels from my receiver on a previous firmware but not now with the latest. is the wd definitely only able to output 2 channel aac and not pass thru 6 channel?

second, i’ve tried converting the 6 channel aac to ac3 but the wd says unsupported file format. with the mp4s, i used mmg to convert to mkv. this file plays fine on wd. then using popcorn to convert the aac to ac3, remux and it won’t play. i’ve tried it with 3 different files. been over the popcorn tutorial and can’t see anything i’m doing wrong.

any advice on a way i can convert the aac to ac3 and get it to play on my wd tv live? and thanks for all the help in the past!

Herschel.

quick question for you, I am using Handbrake to rip a dozen or so HD-DVDs i bought way back.  They seem to contain Dolby Digital Plus audio tracks.  They seem to work fine on my WD Live hooked to the Onkyo Receiver, but i get no audio on the Live hooked directly to my tv via HDMI in the bedroom.  I have the live set to stereo.  Is this a handbrake issue with the audio tracks i am choosing or is this a live issue?