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I have over the years bought several concerts on bluray and DVD and I have traditionally converted them into MP3 files landing in iTunes to listen to on my iPhone. Now I've found that my AirPods support spatial sound which I was wondering if it would make a more immersed experience if I reconverted those with surround sound using appropriate software.

What encoding should I use for this and what would be a good way to get this given say a MKV corresponding to the physical disk?

Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
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    Do you see VOB files on those DVDs? I haven’t ripped blu-ray, but I have extracted DVD audio – Allan Jul 26 '23 at 23:01
  • VLC can do this. There's a long explanation at https://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_HowTo/Extract_audio/ which my eyes glazed over about 1/3 the way through ;) Ideally, you want to extract as AC3 which I think you will need to encapsulate in M4A to get it to play easily. – Tetsujin Jul 27 '23 at 06:52
  • There's also mkvtoolnix - a hideously complex command line app with a Mac GUI front end which I use just to change the video title on screen [I've never gone any deeper into it than that;) There's a mind-numbing guide at https://mkvtoolnix.download/doc/mkvextract.html but also this is how I set up the GUI on Mac; which wasn't really all that obvious to me at the start - https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/367743/85275 – Tetsujin Jul 27 '23 at 06:58
  • @allan I have used handbrake and makemkv so far which handled these for me. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Jul 27 '23 at 07:40
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    @Tetsujin I’m fine with a complex command line (they can usually be scripted) so I’ll have a closer look. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Jul 27 '23 at 07:42
  • Wish you luck :) – Tetsujin Jul 27 '23 at 07:44
  • Ok…so just to confirm, Handbrake was able to rip a BR disk? – Allan Jul 29 '23 at 01:59
  • @Allan Yes, using the makemkv libraries. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Jul 29 '23 at 09:01
  • According to https://www.whathifi.com/advice/what-is-apple-spatial-audio it appears that "Apple spatial audio takes 5.1, 7.1 and Dolby Atmos signals..." and Handbrake by default downmixes to Dolby Prologic. Worth a try. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Jul 29 '23 at 17:24

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I found by experimentation that the simplest way to get movie mp4 with spatial sound was to use a surround preset in Handbrake.

Still experimenting on how to convert to audio-only but perhaps in the Windows version of iTunes.

Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
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