Best Audio bitrate for Dolby Digital?

[Cablehogue]

I have converted some video to MPEG2 for editing using the program "Any Video Converter". For the audio codec, I chose AC3 over MP2 because I had read that MP2 gives some dvd players problems and I just wanted to play things safe. For the audio bitrate, I chose 224 over 384 and 128. I figured 128 was too low and I didn't choose 384 because I'm not going for surround sound and I read that it too has given some dvd players problems.

Basically, what I am asking is did I choose the best settings? I want to know before I use these same settings to convert some more videos that I need for this editing project. My current settings seem to work great even though I did have an video/ audio sync problem when I tested it out on a DVD but I solved that by doing a two pass encode.

[DVDDoug]

244kbps should be fine.

I've never done any "critical listening tests", but I've never noticed any artifacts, even at 192kbps. (I'm more picky about audio than I am about video quality.) People who have done blind ABX tests on MP3 usually find that they can use bitrates lower than that, and they can't tell the difference from the uncompressed original. And, AC-3 is supposed to be better than MP3!

I'll usually use 244 for stereo. I don't have a good reason for using that bitrate... Except, it's plenty good enough, and it doesn't take much more space than 192... And, and as long as I'm using compressed audio, the audio doesn't take-up much space compared to the video, no matter what audio bitrate I choose.

I had read that MP2 gives some dvd players problems and I just wanted to play things safe.

PAL players are required to play MP2, LPCM, and AC-3. NTSC players (North America) are only required to play LPCM and AC-3, and all fully-compliant NTSC DVDs are required to have at least one LPCM or one AC-3 track.

I didn't choose 384 because I'm not going for surround sound and I read that it too has given some dvd players problems.

That could be true, but I've never heard that. The specs say 64 kbps to 448 kbps, and any player should be able to handle any DVDs that's in-spec. I have heard that some players have trouble with "burned" DVDs that have a combined audio & video bitrate near (or not so near) the spec-limit of 10.08Mbps.

[Cablehogue]

Thanks for the reply! I'm glad that I'm not completely out of my mind with these settings.