[MPlayer-users] Re: Mencoder: (TIVO) Audio syc problems.

[Jonathan Rogers]

D Richard Felker III wrote:
>>You dont. Unless there is really a reason to change the sampling
>>rate of the audio stream leave it alone.
>>If you really ought to you have to resample it with -af.
> 
> 
> Wrong, you definitely should change it. When encoding movies, you
> don't want to waste too many bits on audio, and at the same bitrate,
> 44100 will sound much better than 48000.
> 
> Also, 44100 has the benefit of playing on all sane hardware without
> resampling.
> 
> With that said, the option is -srate 44100.

That's your opinion. I've encoded the audio from various DVDs to stereo 
Vorbis, with the resulting average bitrate less than 100Kbps and I don't 
notice a loss of quality. I'm sure detail is lost, but resampling loses 
some too. Good lossy audio encoders, like Vorbis and LAME, employ 
filters and noise masking, so forcing resampling doesn't automatically 
increase the perceived quality.

Perhaps you've done extensive testing and determined that MP3 at 44100 
Hz sounds better to you than 48000 Hz at the same bitrate, but it's not 
a black and white issue. Lossy encoding is concerned with perception, 
making it inherently subjective.

Are you still using your SB16 from 1996? If so, that's fine, but you may 
not be aware that most (if not all) modern sound hardware supports 48 
kHz audio, probably for the sole purpose of playing DVDs.

Jonathan Rogers