[MPlayer-users] [OT] AC3 vs. DTS

[Alexander Roalter]

Rich Felker wrote:
> I consider 2-disc totally unacceptable. Who the hell wants to get up
> and switch discs in the middle of watching a movie? It totally ruins
> the atmosphere! LOTR would fit just fine on one disc if properly
> encoded.

I'm not sure I can agree with this, 4 Stereo tracks, 1 5.1 DD track and 
a DTS track together already consume a lot of space. And although some 
level of quality can be achieved with 3-4 Mb/s, and LOTR is in Scope 
with 130 lines of black bars (PAL), i still doubt 250 minutes are *that* 
well compressable on one DVD-9.

2-Disc is no problem with mplayer. Dump the tracks beforehand, cat'em 
together and you don't have any flicker/click or something else in the 
transition, especially with part 2 & 3, where the break is not that well 
placed as in the first part with a fade to black. On the 2nd, you even 
hear it on the soundtrack, the 2nd disc starts with a sound fading out!

All you need is ~20 GB of free space, and you can watch the movie in one 
rush. Same is valid for the 2disc edition of once upon a time in 
america, spartacus, the godfather pt.2 As long as DVDs are not 
DVD-10,-14 or -18, I'm quite happy with films split on two discs. And if 
you use a script to play the DVDs, put in two DVD drives and use
mplayer -fixed-vo -dvd-device=/dev/hdc dvd://1 -dvd-device=/dev/hdd dvd://1

(or something like it)

cheers,
Alex