Hmmm. Perplexing issue here that I thought would be much easier than it is (or at least appears to be).

I have several live music DVDs with HD audio in 5.1 (usually DTS). Is there a way I can keep the higher bit rate but downmix to 2.0 to store as a .flac or apple lossless and play through a normal stereo?

The closest I’ve got so far is getting the DTS track out as a .mka, but I’m having no luck finding software that will downmix this and convert it to .flac (or even .wav).

Do any audio nerds have any ideas?

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12519_7-9961989-49.html

I popped this into google “convert music dvd to pc” and there were a few other options. The solution above should have enough scope to keep the quality there.

Ffmpeg would probably do it, very few audio things it can’t do.

Vlc player should also do it (as a transcode).

Both of them you’ll have to fight options till it works though.

It may or may not sound good though – weird things can go on in downmixing.

Well, after years of using vlc as a media player, today I learned something new! Looks like VLC does the trick 🙂

Thanks guys

VLC is fairly awesome not found much it wont play or fix yet

Actually, scratch that – it doesn’t seem to be quite doing it right. The timing’s all to pot i.e. it thinks a 90 min concert is only 4 minutes, and you can’t skip along i.e. move the progress bar and it just dumps you back to the start. And it crashes in anything other than vlc.

Hmmm

OK, now found a free trial of DVD Audio Extractor (30 days should be enough to do the 20 or so music DVDs I have).

Next question – what’s going to be highest quality? Downmixing Dolby Digital / DTS, or using the DVD’s downmixed 2-channel?

Dvd 2 channel – they know the right downmix settings (or may even mix completely differently).
Unless the dvd is done very badly that is.