[mythtv-users] Ripping DVD's with DTS to x264 while retaining the DTS in sync

[Kevin Ould]

Hello everyone,

I am in the process of ripping my DVD's onto my Myth box using x264 the keep
the size manageable. On my old setup(Windows based) I simply just ripped
them straight up with no compression which obviously worked well but took up
too much space. I have a 250gig drive for this purpose and with my old
method it was full before I knew what happened. :P So this brings me to my
new plan which entails using the x264 codec to save alot of space and keep a
fairly high quality picture while hopefully also retaining the Dolby Digital
and/or DTS tracks. I have been attempting this by using the following script
which was recently posted by Scott Alfter(thanks!!). I just ripped a movie I
own today which has a Dolby Digital track and it seemed to work pretty well,
here is the script I used for that:

#!/bin/sh
nice -n 18 mencoder \
-vf harddup \
-ovc copy \
-oac copy \
-of rawaudio \
-o "${2}.ac3" \
"${1}" && \
nice -n 18 mencoder \
-vf pullup,softskip,${3},harddup \
-ofps 24000/1001 \
-ovc x264 \
-x264encopts \
bitrate=1400:pass=1:turbo=2:keyint=240:bframes=3:direct_pred=auto \
-oac copy \
-o /dev/null \
"${1}" && \
nice -n 18 mencoder \
-vf pullup,softskip,${3},harddup \
-ofps 24000/1001 \
-ovc x264 \
-x264encopts \
bitrate=1400:pass=2:turbo=2:keyint=240:bframes=3:direct_pred=auto \
-oac copy \
-of rawvideo \
-o "${2}.264" \
"${1}" && \
nice -n 18 MP4Box "${2}.mp4" -fps 23.976 -add "${2}.264" && \
nice -n 18 mkvmerge -o "${2}.mkv" "${2}.mp4" "${2}.ac3"
#rm "${2}.264" "${2}.ac3" "${2}.mp4"

As I mentioned this has worked well on the first attempt with a Dolby
Digital track. My problem lies with DTS audio. I have attemtped a rip using
various settings but all my attempts have resulted in sound that is pretty
far out of sync. It seems to start out relatively in sync but quickly goes
out of sync and it seems to get progressively worse as the movie goes on. By
the end of the movie I estimate the sound was about 1.5 to 2 mins out of
sync. I basically started out with the script above but changing the
"${2}.ac3" entries to "${3}.dts" which mkvmerge correctly identifies with as
being a DTS audio track. I have tried a couple different bitrates as well as
removing the "softskip, pullup and hardup" vf options but all seemed to
produce the same/very similar outputs. Does anyone have a method they use
which works reliably or any suggestions? I know I could simply just use the
Dolby Digital track rather than the DTS but I prefer to use DTS whenever
available as I think it sound marginally better.

Thanks,

Kevin
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