Apple Lossless audio in .m4v video container

[Mr Dobey]

As of now Apple Lossless Audio is not supported with video in a .m4v/.mp4 container. Both the developers of MP4 Tools and Subler say ALAC is not sported yet.

Main Goal:
Transcode Blue Ray DTS-HD Master Audio or TrueHD Audio to Apple Lossless.

This way one could losslessly transcode a complete Blue Ray to a .m4v container playable by iTunes/Quicktime X.

Obviously a full transcode is already available with MakeMKV. But again natively DTS-HD Master Audio and TrueHD are not supported in the .m4v container.

eAC3to (Win) can already transcode DTS-HD Master Audio/TrueHD to FLAC, which then can be transcoded to Apple Lossless (Mac). But no Muxer that I am aware of can mux Apple Lossless and raw H.264 together.

If possible I would see an Applescript to would chain together the following:

Blue Ray > MakeMKV > demux (MP4Tools 3) > ALAC transcoder > mux (H.264 & ALAC).

I'm sure it would be plausible to create a Mac app in the near future that could transcode like eAC3to or at least get Wine support rolling. And of course VC-1 Blue Rays would be off limits from the get go.

 

[osohardy]

handbrake nightly build can add dts-hd as passthru in mp4 apparently, but virtually nothing will play it (you need very recent ffmpeg). I don't know what if any player on mac OS X would fit that bill but at least a start. It would be a nice compromise to at least have a decoder/encoder mac side like eac3to so if you have to re-encode to ac3 for apple tv you could do it from the lossless track.

 

[Mr Dobey]

it's a start

I was unaware of handbrake achieving DTS-HD in .mp4, thank you for sharing!
That's at least one step further.

Do you happen to know any of the handbrake developers? I'd be interested to know their knowledge on the subject.

 

[osohardy]

no i don't know them, I was just browsing the forum for related topics and saw mention of it, I think in the devices section.

 

[Mr Dobey]

I'm trying to figure out if adding ALAC is technically possible right now or is quicktime the one holding us back. According to Wikipedia it is. Though I've never come across a .mp4 file that already has ALAC in it.