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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ixian" data-source="post: 516096" data-attributes="member: 54932">Toga beat me to it - audio is converted to FLAC, which is an open source uncompressed format. That means what you think it does - the audio fidelity of, for example, True-HD/MA-HD is maintained. In fact audio is the main reason all of these tools (well, Eac3to anyway) came in to being - you may not be aware of this, but it's actually very difficult to play uncompressed HD audio from BD/HDVD out of a PC. Until *very* recently, it required a special $200 sound card, the Xonar D2 HD version (which was hard to find in the US) and you had to use the version of Arcsoft Total Media theater that came with the card - not any version of TME, but the OEM build bundled with the Xonar. That used to be the one and only way you could playback BD and HDDVD disks on a PC and still get the full uncompressed audio. Other players, like PowerDVD, or other builds of TME for that matter, would downsample the audio thanks to PAP (Protected Audio Path, aka DRM for audio), which wasn't fully supported on most PC's - you needed a sound card AND the software together to support it.The whole mess was (and is) completely stupid, and it's not until just recently, with the release of the ATI 57xx series video cards, that you could actually send uncompressed audio to your receiver without going through the custom steps above (and you still need to use a recent player like PowerDVD 9). Under no circumstances, even now, could you play uncompressed audio in MPC-HC, Mediaportal, etc - of course, you can't play BD disks video with the built in player either.Naturally, HT enthusiasts weren't going to take that laying down. First came AnyDVD HD, which to this day effortlessly strips restrictive DRM from your disks. Then came eac3to, a tool that extracts the now-unprotected video and audio from the disks - the video it leaves untouched, since VC-1, etc can be played back with the right codec packs in Mediaportal and other players, but audio was still a problem because of PAP. So eac3to also takes the uncompressed audio track and converts it to FLAC, a free, open-source, uncompressed audio codec that any media player (including Mediaportal) can play back, at full fidelity.So the way it works is, you still have to have a way to bitstream 8 channel audio to a receiver that can handle it - if you have an HDMI 1.3a compliant video card (like the newer Intels, ATI, and Nvidia cards have) and of course a receiver that can handle HD audio formats in the first place then you do - and Mediaportal/your media player of choice will send that nice uncompressed FLAC stream right to your receiver (known as bitstreaming) and you get nice full audio, the way it was meant to be.Believe it or not that's how it all started - as a side benefit, you now also have the ability to make nice clean .mkv files with your HD video, audio, alternate audio (dubs, etc), subtitles, chapter steps, extra features (like video extras), etc all in one container that Mediaportal can not only play, but can read inside the user interface with your remote so you can pick subtitles to show, etc etc. Furthermore, if you don't mind a little compression, and like smaller file sizes, you can reencode your video using h.264 (there are tons of programs that do this, my favorite is MeGUI: <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/megui" target="_blank">meGUI | Get meGUI at SourceForge.net</a> ) and make your overall file size smaller at a small sacrifice to quality that frankly most people wouldn't notice.Anyway, that's the story. Enjoy<img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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