Converting DTS files to DD5.1

Fri, Nov 20, 2015

I have a Sonos PLAYBAR which doesn’t support DTS - it maxes out at DD5.1. For DTS files it downmixes to 2 channel which the PLAYBAR has a decent go at making ‘surround’ but.. it’s just not the same. Handily, ffmpeg (which I have installed via Homebrew - I use OSX) can do this conversion easily:

ffmpeg -i infile.mkv -vcodec copy -acodec ac3 -ac 6 outfile.mkv

Given I have a directory of files to convert, I went looking for something that would do a batch conversion and while there are a few OSX GUI tools out there I thought it would be easier to borrow someone else’s shell script and I found this one, written to use Handbrake but easily converted to use ffmpeg. I also amended it to rename the old file without the .mkv extension and name the new file ,dd5.mkv so the new version will be picked up by Kodi when it next does a library scan. My version is up as a GitHub Gist - you will need to modify paths to suit your system and there is minimal error checking.