It has been a while since I last posted, mainly due to not having Internet access at home for a month

Anyway, I’m online again and I have been tinkering with various projects the most recent of which is Matroska conversion (again).  For sometime I have been converting Martoska files to MPEG-4 with AAC 5.1 audio so I can stream them via Mediatomb to my PS3. The conversion process works well although there is some overhead in transcoding the audio and the AAC 5.1 audio is not as good quality as the original AC3 or DTS. If you are interested I’ve posted my script which automates the whole process in the Code section of this site and you can find all the gory details on my Coverting MKV to MP4 wiki page.

A little while back I read it was possible to convert those same Matroska file to M2TS files which, so long as the audio is AC3, takes much less time to convert. As the PS3 can’t play DTS audio streams inside a M2TS container there is still a requirement to transcode DTS to Ac3. That said the conversion to M2TS requires less file I/O than converting to MPEG-4 and is therefore it is generally a quicker conversion method, typically just 2 or 3 minutes on my workstation at home. Plus the audio quality of the Ac3 or transcode DTS is better than that of transcoded AAC 5.1

I’ve created my own script to fully automate the conversion process. The script has been teston Ubuntu 81.0 64-bit but there is an outside chance it will work on Mac OS X if you can get the required tools installed. You can find my script and all the details on my Converting MKV to M2TS wiki page.