Converting DTS audio to AC3 (.mkv file container) on OS X
I have a lot of .mkv files that contain the audio as a DTS stream, which usually means that it can’t be read by my particular brand of media player (Netgear EVA8000). The DTS audio stream requires a paid for license to decode and/or special equipment to deal with the codec. However the AC3 codec which is another Dolby Digital codec has a free library implementation meaning that there are no licensing issues with using this codec, hence it being used with my media player. This obviously resulted in trawling the internet to find some solution to carrying out this conversion, which led me to this windows only solution:
– VID2EVA http://www.vid2eva.com/
This can be used on a mac by downloading virtualbox / vmware fusion / parallels and creating an XP machine and installing it in there and it will work fine.
However the issue that I personally have is that, the amount of extra CPU cycles needed for a virtualization layer sitting between the heavy amount of re-encoding of a data stream just bugs me. After a bit more research I found a script called mkvdts2ac3 that replaces the GUI of VID2EVA and with the right third party binaries will allow you to complete the re-encoding. A look into what would be required to build these third party binaries led me to a few other guides telling you to install xcode, download various tools, compile this, install that… It took quite a bit of messing around however I’ve gotten all of the Intel binaries sorted and the script and packaged them for convenience
– Please find the archive (tar.gz) here
–Installation instructions
Once extracted their will be a bin and a lib directory. As root move everything from the bin to /usr/local/bin directory, and move everything from the lib directory to /usr/local/lib directory.
–Usage
Open Terminal.app and execute mkvdts2ac3 as normal.
Read More