Best program and method to convert just the audio track and add back to container file?

General Discussions
1

Hello all, fairly new to Plex and have been loving it! Already became a lifetime member. Needless to say I’ve been researching many different topics and have everything setup perfectly thru my home network and NAS, and it’s been working wonderfully remotely as well.

I’m hoping someone could save me a little time and point me in the right direction. I have many movies from the past that are in either Dolby Digital (AC3) or DTS. Because I exclusively use Chromcast to stream my media from my NAS (Qnap TS-253A) to all my TVs I would like all my media be .264 and have AAC audio tracks so no transcoding takes place on the audio tracks and the media can direct stream from my NAS.

I’ve been looking at many options and it’s all very confusing to me at the moment. I’m a sound engineer and computer tech, but unfortunately do not know much about video and it’s various formats beyond the basics. However i am very capable of handling very technical software if need be. What I would like to be able to do is take my movies with AC3 or DTS and convert the audio to AAC, and add, not replace, that track in slot 0 in either an mp4 or mkv container so it plays as the default audio track, but also retain the original DTS or AC3 track in slot 1 so I can choose which file i want in plex before i play the movie.

As you can see I know what has to be done (I think) but researching i realized i was looking at old information, and there are a few different steps that have to be taken using different techniques. What i’m looking for is one program that can do it all so I don’t have to switch programs, and it would be perfect if I could do batch processing so I don’t have to do every movie individually, but that’s best case scenario. So speed is what i’m looking for, and I do not want to touch the video track, just the audio track. I’m assuming something like Handbrake and ffmpg is what I would be looking at, but that is where i started to really get confused, and you guys could literally save me hours of researching and i would be most appreciative. I’m not afraid of using command lines if I have to, but a simple GUI based app would be great too if it’s quick and efficient, especially specifically for this purpose. I really appreciate it and thanks ahead of time!

2

This will depend on what OS you use. I use Windows and there is an easy program called XMedia Recode that can do what you want in 1 step. http://www.xmedia-recode.de/en/download.html

3

Sorry, yes i use Windows 7/10 and also linux Ubuntu 14.04 on the Qnap NAS.

I checked out the software above, and it’s’ not apparent to me how I convert the audio track and add it to the video container as a second track, and have it be the first default track that gets played. I do see how to convert just the audio track, and just “copy” the video track as indicated the program.

4

You can create audio tracks with Handbreak and its free.

5

I use XMedia Recode at xmedia-recode.de/

you can tell it to just copy the video track & either convert or add an audio track in a different codec

so you can add the audio track twice keep one as whatever your file is if it’s dts then dts and convert the other to aac or whichever you choose

if all your doing is audio 10 mins per file or less

If you want to change what audio track is default I believe MKVToolNix will do this

mkvtoolnix.download/downloads.html#windows

2 mins per file

with these two tools I make all my media direct play

Handbreak works also just takes a lot longer