Hey Jacob. Thanks for the info on vlc. I had only ever used vlc in
the past when I wanted to either play audio that itunes wouldn't play,
or if it was something I didn't want in my library. So I didn't
really know a lot about its features.
Exporting the ac3 file to wave did work, however it seemed to happen
in real time, or close to it. I know back in winamp, the disk writer
plugin would be much faster than real time.
What I really need is something that can go much faster than real
time, because I have a few box sets of tv shows that I want, and I it
would take way too long to do it that way.
Darcy
On 13-Jan-08, at 3:32 AM, Jacob Schmude wrote:
Hi
Actually, VLC is capable of writing a wave file via one of its
output modules. To set it up:
• Go into VLC preferences, expand audio, then expand output modules
• Under output modules, highlight "file," and set up your
parameters. Leave the audio format on S16, and set the output
channels to 2, then set the name and location of the output file. If
you don't see some of these settings, check the advanced checkbox to
show them.
• Now, go back up to the output modules category and set the output
module to file. Start playing your AC3 file and you should get a
wave file. This works similar to the disk writer plugin of WinAMP,
if you're familiar with that.
Remember to set it back to default or "hal output" before you play
any files you don't want decoded.
You can now encode it with whatever you like, be it iTunes, lame,
max, etc.
hth
On Jan 12, 2008, at 11:13 PM, Darcy Burnard wrote:
Hi everyone. Well, I think Mac the ripper might be a good solution
for ripping the audio from a dvd. You can have it just extract the
ac3 audio stream. I tested it on an episode of Saturday Night Live
which I believe was 1 hour and twelve minutes in length. It took
just over 10 minutes to extract the file.
Now I have this ac3 file on my hard drive which vlc can play just
fine, but I want to convert it to either mp3 or aac so that it
takes up less space, and so that I can put it on my ipod. I did
find an ac3 codec for quicktime. Once I installed that, the file
would play in quicktime player. I was hoping it would play in
itunes as well, so that I could use itunes to transcode the file,
but no such luck. Itunes won't touch the file.
I'm thinking that quicktime pro could convert the file, but I'd
like to know for sure before plunking down the $37 Canadian that
Apple wants for quicktime pro. I don't know if any of you have
quicktime pro or not, but for those who do, I have a question. Can
I safely assume that if QT can play a file type, that it could
convert that file to another type?
Alternatively, does anyone know of another way to convert ac3 files
in to something else?
Darcy
