[michael123]

Hi

I need your advice, and to check myself if there is some better technique...

I have few MC DVD-A without stereo layer.
Sometimes I succeed to rip it with latest DVD-A Explorer into stereo (if there is 2nd substream in MC with matrix coefficients for stereo), if not - I combine all these channels into one file and then use Foobar2K's '5.1 to stereo' plugin..
To my ears that's good enough.. Is it OK from your perspective?

BTW, if there are BOTH MC and stereo layers, what is better from your expierence: get the original stereo layer, or take the MC and convert it to stereo as described above?

Michael

[ted_b]

I always rip the stereo layer, and if there isn't one I use DVDAExplorer's built-in "get stereo downmix" use of the SMARTS table of contents.

[michael123]

Yes, thanks, this is exactly what I do - if sub-stream with this SMART is available there on the disk.

Otherwise, are there any other suggestions for downmix, besides the Foobar I use?

[ted_b]

DVD-A standards say there must be a stereo layer or a SMARTS table.  If yet to find one that isn't one or the other.

EDIT:  OOPS, i just did.  The Band's Music From Big Pink has two title areas, but both come up as multichannel, and neither allow stereo downmixing!  ??  Weird.

Edit Again:  Found it.  It's in the video_ts folder (i.e the DVD-Video portion) and listed in title 2 as 24/96 PCM 2-channel, therefore rippable with DVD Audio Extractor.

[bigbwb]

On a related note,
Has anyone successfully ripped the stereo (2ch) tracks from the DVD_A disc from Rob Thomas "Something to be"?  Its a Dual disc I own and for whatever reason, I can only extract the 5.1 tracks?

On a side note, its a well recorded album with some great male vocals.

Thanks,
Brandon

[ted_b]

Brandon,
My understanding of that disc in particular is that it was one of the early dualdiscs, and as such relegated the stereo content to the cd side only.  However, I hope I am wrong.  Do you have DVDAExplorer?  Have you tried the "get stereo downmix" option, which uses the SMARTS table on the disc to do channel mapping to a very good (usually) stereo downmix result from the 5.1 group/title/layer?

[bigbwb]

Ted,
Thanks for the reply.  The 2ch mix is available via the onscreen menu but does not show up under DVDA explorer.  So for DVD-A you have the option of 5.1 or 2.0 onscreen.  Yes, I have tried the "get stereo downmix" option and I beilieve it either does not work or I get an error?

I figured this was due to one of tww things, me (user error) or the authoring of the disc, and its sounds like the latter.

Brandon,
My understanding of that disc in particular is that it was one of the early dualdiscs, and as such relegated the stereo content to the cd side only.  However, I hope I am wrong.  Do you have DVDAExplorer?  Have you tried the "get stereo downmix" option, which uses the SMARTS table on the disc to do channel mapping to a very good (usually) stereo downmix result from the 5.1 group/title/layer?