Ta for that. Your comment on comskip explains a few things!
If you want to get a sample from BBC - record the 'this is bbc hd' bits that get put on BBC One HD in place of the local news. They start as stereo and transition to 5.1 fairly early in the programme - assume they are all the same. I've used the lunch time one for testing a few times.
Re the audio - be interested to know what you find, see if it matches what I've seen/think I've seen. Re the audio issue - if you aren't on freeview, it'll be ok - satellite use -aac- ac3. If it's freeview, with the AAC LATM audio, handbrake can't pass it through for some reason like it can normal AAC. So it re-encodes and drops it to stereo with varying success.
On Thursday, 11 April 2013 at 10:37, redmine@tvheadend.org wrote:
> Tvheadend - General: RE: UK Freeview HD Soundtrack Conversion to AC3? (
https://tvheadend.org/d/1099-uk-freeview-hd-soundtrack-conversion-to-ac3?r=8233#message-8233)
> Prof Yaffle
> I cant say if Handbrake eats the audio on TS yet - I hope it doesn't! - but I'm busy seeking things out on BBC HD that may have a 5.1 track so I can do some testing. If it does then I'll have little choice but to ProjectX it first because mmg won't chop a TS file without choking otherwise. I could try avidemux, I suppose, but that pretty universally borks out on H.264 streams on any platform/version I've tried.
> HB settings... constant quality, RF19, HP, CBR (comskip on Windows chokes on VBR). Audio, I then just pass through. I really transcode MPEG2/SD programmes to tidy them up, sort out some interlacing issues, a squash them; HD programmes don't really compress much (well, films don't - cartoons do), so I'm only really doing that to either crop out C4HD's logo, prepare them for comskip or fix the indexing artefacts left by mmg. Which I can't use on TS anyway, which is why I went down the mkv route in the fist place...
> I can check the full suite of settings later if you wish, but I think I've some experimenting of my own to do yet. If HB eats the audio on these as well, I think I'll have to resign myself to (a) ProjectX, which I've no idea if it runs in batch/unattended/automated/CLI mode, or (b) just leaving the blighters alone!
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