How to play your new blu-ray TDSOTM disc!
Here's the deal. You have a blu-ray disc with TDSOTM on it and you want to play it! What to do… Sony would like you to purchase a hardware blu-ray DVD player. I don't know about you but for me, a hardware DVD player with outputs ALMOST as good as my current DAC outputs costs around $3500 and up. Yes, $3500 for a downgrade. Um, no.
Fortunately we have XBMC Media Center (both Mac & Win even). http://xbmc.org/download/ Life is great… almost. XBMC has a little bug that can affect 'analog' output and sometimes also 'hdmi' output. (You choose analog to send audio out of an audio interface to go to analog inputs on your amplifiers or choose hdmi out to send audio digitally to a surround receiver so equipped.) HDMI works correctly for some systems. 5.1 files (and stereo) play correctly all the time on every system. The bug is with anything else (like 4.0 for ex). XBMC misbehaves and downmixes everything less than 5.1 to stereo. Evil. The quadraphonic audio stream on TDSOTM blu-ray is of course 4.0. So we need to rip the tracks from the disc and convert them to 5.1 files to play correctly.
Songbird http://getsongbird.com/product/songbird-desktop.php is an audio only media player that will play multichannel flac files. Songbird does not appear to have the bugs XBMC has and will play 4.0 files correctly.
First, here are the 8 tracks on the blu-ray disc. This differs considerably from the labeling.
01 The Dark Side Of The Moon (3 audio streams to choose from: 5.1 remix, quad, stereo all 24/96)
02 North American Tour 1975 Concert Screen Reels (2 audio streams to choose from: stereo or 5.1 all 24/48)
03 French Tour 1974 Concert Screen Reels (2 audio streams to choose from: stereo or 5.1 all 24/48)
04 TDSOTM 2003 Documentary (16/48 stereo)
05 British Tour 1974 Concert Screen Reels (2 audio streams to choose from: stereo or 5.1 all 24/48)
06 Roger The Hat interview (16/48 dolby stereo) <- this track is 'hidden' as an easter egg on hardware blu-ray players
07 Careful With That Axe, Eugene - Brighton 1972-06-29 (16/48 stereo)
08 Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun - Brighton 1972-06-29 (16/48 stereo)
Here are the instructions:
Software required (all free or beta or demo):
MakeMKV http://www.makemkv.com/download/
eac3to (Win command line app only - just be quiet) http://www.softpedia.com/progDownloa...oad-74016.html
Wine (to help run the Win app) http://davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/wine-mac/
Wave Agent http://www.sounddevices.com/download/waveagent.html
Hardware required:
Blu-ray disc drive.
RIP THE DISC TO MKV FILES
1. Load the TDSOTM blu-ray disc
2. Launch MakeMKV (let it call home - it needs to get copy protection codes)
3. Click the Open Blu-ray disc button. You will see the tracks listed.
4. Set your output folder path.
5. Select the track(s) and contents of each to rip. Here I've selected only track 1 (TDSOTM studio album) and only the 1973 quad mix audio stream. There may be ways to get more complicated with batch processing with eac3to but for now we're going to play it safe and take it easy on this little Windows app.
6. Click the Make MKV button to start it ripping.
7.When it's finished you will find track00.mkv in the output folder.
MakeMKV noted a few small files that it omitted. I assume these are menu's, chirps, buzzes, menu music, etc.
***MOST OF YOU CAN STOP RIGHT HERE AND PLAY THE MKV FILES WITH XBMC.***
CONVERT THE MKV FILES TO WAV
8. Launch Wine and open the 'DOS prompt' window (this is the terminal for command line).
*Commandline 101: You need to specify COMPLETE file paths. Or put all the files into the same folder as the app and then 'change directory' to that folder.*
9. In this example I dragged the mkv file into the eac3to folder for convenience with the file paths. Let's say you have eac3to in /Users/JN/Wine Files/drive_c/Program Files/eac3to
9.5. Type this into terminal to point it to that folder "cd /Users/JN/Wine Files/drive_c/Program Files/eac3to" inside of the quotes of course
10. enter this command inside the quotes: "eac3to track00.mkv TDSOTM4.0.wav"
11. When it's finished you will have the file TDSOTM4.0.wav in the same folder. This is a single (43some minute long) standard 4 channel quadraphonic wav file with correct channel assignments.
CONVERT THE SINGLE 4.0 WAV FILE TO MULTIPLE 5.1 FLAC
12. Import the file into your favorite DAW. I'm using Protools in this example but there are free or demo options like Reaper (http://www.reaper.fm/download.php) available. Many DAW's require single mono files. If your DAW does not have the ability to split the files on import, you may need to split the 4.0 file into 4 mono files first. Wave Agent is a free app that will do this.
13. Make sure the tracks are labeled with the correct channel extension (.L, .R, .Ls, .Rs for mono tracks 1 - 4 respectively).
14. Create 2 blank tracks the EXACT same length as the main 4. These will be the blank C and Lf channels.
15. Arrange the channel order to be L, R, C, Lf, Ls, Rs. You can group 6 mono track channels together or put this in a single 5.1 track depending on your DAW's features.
16. Now split these long regions up by song, slicing the entire group at each index point.
17. Label and save as individual files. Use the channel extensions in the name so you know what channel is what. You now have groups of 6 mono files for each song.
18. Use Wave Agent to combine the 6 mono wav files into single 5.1 wav files. Pay attention to keeping the channel order (see above) correct when arranging the channels in Wave Agent to combine. ***
19 You can now use an app like Max (http://sbooth.org/Max/) to convert the 5.1 wavs to 5.1 flacs. Use an app like Tag (http://sbooth.org/Tag/) to tag them if you wish.
You now have standard lossless 24/96 5.1 flac files which are compatible with XBMC Media Center to play. Note that the file size does not noticeably increase due to the 2 blank tracks after converting to flac.
Note:
MakeMKV, eac3to & Wave Agent are the ONLY apps I found that do what they do (and do it correctly).
*** There's a little bug I've discovered in Wave Agent. The channel indexes will all be set to 1 in the combined file you create (but will still be interleaved in the correct order). Converting the 5.1 wav to a 5.1 flac with Max is a workaround (Max doesn't have a problem with this) and the 5.1 flac files created are by the book.
Here are some blu-ray ripping and MKV to WAV conversion apps that DO NOT WORK that you should not waste any time experimenting with (they either don't support multichannel or don't support higher sampling frequencies or 24 bit or just don't work at all):
tsMuxeR
PavTube Blu-ray ripper
River Past Audio Converter
MKVExtract
iMKVExtract
Aiseesoft Blu-ray Ripper
Mkvtoolnix
Mac Blu-ray Ripper Pro
Xilisoft MKV Converter
This is what you might be in for if you decide to experiment with different apps.
So far XBMC is the only media player app that works with multichannel audio and video. Some people have found VLC and/or Foobar to work on certain systems only. These apps appear to bypass standard audio protocol, so the specific hardware determines if they will work or not. Best left alone.
This is all done on a Mac. It is very likely possible to accomplish this on Windows (eac3to is actually a Win app). Someone else will need to translate - I'm done for now. Have fun!
PS. I kept everything else as MKV files. Convenient.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by *******
no loss of time or quality.
