AAC vs AC3 bitrates
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?
Hi Zedstrain, I’m guessing we’re talking about movies’ audio tracks. Passthrough is always best if we can stomach the storage space, especially if the video is taking a lot more space anyway.
If compressing, why not opus? Should be at least slighly better than AAC, it’s constantly improving and thanks to its licensing the encoders you’ll find included in any up-to-date software like Handbrake should work really well.
With AAC (which does sound great and is very close to opus) you’re gonna see bigger differences depending on the encoder. I only used it for music and podcasts (when I got into modding classic iPods 😂), but to avoid installing encoder libraries in the system and using ffmpeg which I’m too dumb for, I used fre:ac because it included good encoders like FDK.
Anyway normally 224kbps is plenty with AAC, I would never go higher for music for example. For movies there’s the multiple channels thing to consider, might be safe to go a bit higher for 7.1 or more channels, but I have no direct experience.
Zedstrian
pipes