Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

55072 readers

410 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others

Loot, Pillage, & Plunder

📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):

💰 Please help cover server costs.


Ko-fi	Liberapay

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

AAC vs AC3 bitrates (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In the past I've chosen I've often kept AC3 audio tracks thinking that their substantially higher bitrates made them better than the AAC tracks I compared them to. As I've since learned that AAC can be comparable to AC3 at a substantially lower bitrate, to have a means of comparing the two codecs, what would the AAC-equivalent bitrates be for 224kbps and 640kbps AC3?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] pipes 16 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Hi Zedstrain If compressing, why not opus? AAC is almost as good but you have to make sure you're using a good encoder, and its licensing is not as open.

Anyway I found this table, next to "Music Storage", it shows the suggested bitrate values depending on the number of audio channels, from 96 to 450. Should applicable to movies, and to AAC (maybe adding 10% bitrate?).

For movies I'd use these values personally:

2 channels: kbps 128 (150 AAC)

6 (5.1): 196 (224 AAC)

8 (7.1): 256 (300 AAC)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

As I don't want to reduce the quality of an already lossy codec, I'm instead comparing identical audio tracks of the same release that differ only in their codecs and bitrates. For instance, would a stereo 224kbps AC3 audio track be equivalent to a 128kbps AAC audio track, or is one of the two better than the other?

[–] pipes 5 points 9 months ago

From a quick look on wikipedia, looks like AC3 does not support VBR. That is enough to make AAC twice as good at least, especially since movies have a lot of silence in them, so your ratio of 1:2 equivalence seems right to me

[–] pipes 3 points 9 months ago

Sorry I edited my other reply heavily because I noticed later that you were interested in some exact bitrate numbers.. I don't know enough about AC3 to know an equivalent number, all I can say is those numbers I've written for opus and AAC are in my experience enough to enjoy any movie.