[MPlayer-users] How programmatically determine the correct one of two english soundtracks for an encode

[Steve Dibb]

On Sat, 07 Jul 2012 15:02:29 -0700, Graham Lawrence wrote:

> I thank you all for your help and comments.  I guess its really an
> unanswerable question.  There seems to be no hard and fast rule as to
> which soundtrack would be movie and which commentary.  I'll just have to
> accept the occasional need to re-encode some movies.
> 
> Wish I'd known about mkv's versatility vs avi earlier, but I found the
> whole subject of encoding so complex I wrote a script to make all the
> decisions for me, and committed to avi because the mencoder
> documentation is heavily oriented to avi.

I have written my own DVD ripper, which I have to send lots of DVDs with 
odd layouts and setup.

For choosing the "right" audio, here's how I order tracks based on input:

1. Check for DTS -- Almost all tracks are Dolby Digital, so if it's DTS, 
it's pretty much guaranteed to be the right one.
2. Check for the highest number of channels -- audio commentary will be 
two channels (audio).  Dolby Digital will usually be six channels (5.1)
3. Finally, take the audio track that is listed first where the language 
is English

hth

Steve