[mythtv-users] Any Blu-Ray success stories?

[Scott Alfter]

Here's what I wrote the last time:
> Since my last message, I rebuilt mplayer & ffmpeg from svn trunk; after 
> twiddling some options, I got playback working.  The only snag is that audio 
> gets downmixed to stereo.  I next need to at least transcode the audio to AC3 
> so mplayer can spew that out a S/PDIF jack for multichannel playback.  I might 
> also transcode the video to H.264 while I'm at it (haven't checked my other 
> discs yet, but the Caddyshack HD-DVD uses VC-1).
> 
> Some sort of live AC3 encoding, whether in software or hardware, would sidestep 
> this problem.  I'd swear I've run across references to soundcards that do live 
> AC3 encoding before, but I don't recall any manufacturer or model information. 
>   While searching, I found this:
> 
> http://www.essej.net/ac3jack/

Got this up and running, and have it set up so that firing up qjackctl 
automagically starts an instance of ac3jack.  I've tested it with both 
mythfrontend and mplayer; whatever format is used for the source audio gets 
converted to AC3 for playback (confirmed by seeing the Dolby Digital idiot 
light on the surround decoder light up).

For Gentoo users, not all of the necessary ebuilds are in Portage, but they're 
attached to bugs 238324 (ac3jack) and 199858 (aften-svn).  Beyond that, you 
want to use Subversion builds of mplayer (9999-r20) and ffmpeg (20080908) 
provided by the berkano overlay; to enable these to work while staying 
compatible with everything else, you don't want to use a version of x264 newer 
than 0.0.20080301, which is in Portage.  With this combination of builds, both 
mplayer and mythfrontend build and run.

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