I've tried the first way again through the DVD Audio Extractor and it's created a multichannel FLAC file. The music sounds good, though there's something niggling that's not quite right when compared with the original disc. It is minimal though, so not too bothered at the moment.
I've tried the second, more involved way, but stumbled at the first hurdle - that link to the DVD ripping tools doesn't work and I couldn't find PPCMRipper anywhere.
I'm now onto ripping the DVDs and blu-rays. I tried out ripping the first LOTR film using Aiseesoft's blu-ray ripper (which does both formats) and it's working well, it took around an hour a disc to complete though. The audio's spot on, but had to fiddle around getting the subwoofer set up, the yamaha's auto YPAO setup was a bit conservative with with the dB levels, to the point it was effectively off.
That's not a bad idea, but I like trying to do this stuff myself. It could well be in my head - I was off sick yesterday with a migraine (it was weirdly painless, but kept feeling sick and getting the aura thing, which was a first for me), so probably not in the best frame of mind for it. :J
It could be an amp setting I've not found yet. I'm playing the original DVD-A through a player connected to the amp via an optical cable, whereas the rip is streamed from my PC via the HDMI on the Pi. It could be a difference in the modes set up for each of those interfaces.
Even though it's lossless the ripping software gives me different sample rates to rip it at, would that not affect the quality?!
FLAC is encoded, rather than a direct data copy and put in a different container, so samples rates do kinda make sense. But I've never played with FLAC so I don't really know.
Not all DVD-As are 96kHz. Some stereo tracks are 192kHz, and a lot of digitally-produced albums can have odd/low sample rates.
:/
Given the option of a sample rate, what do I go for if a 'same as source' isn't available? I'm doing all this from memory, so I'll screenshot the relevant stuff tonight.
OIC. I only rip to ALAC using iTunes. It doesn't give bitrate options. But that may simply be Apple trying to keep it simple for the dumbarses. Like me.
Here's the thing. Sample rate and bits per sample all affect file size as you'd expect. I've been using the highest settings, which unsuprisingly chuck out the biggest files sizes.
From what I can tell the bitrate doesn't matter. It will still be lossless. The only thing that changes with a lower bitrate is the time it takes to encode.
Your sauce file isn't working. But you want to have the same sample rate at the original material. No point going higher.
bastard by name