[Rumz]

So I know a few people around here have one of the new Mac Minis with Front Row.

Now, the idea that I (and I'm sure many others) had was to rip DVDs to a compressed format for viewing on the Mac Mini. Now, that's simple enough, but getting surround sound doesn't appear to be. Are there any simple solutions to creating an XviD or other avi file with AC3 audio? (apparently mp4/quicktime doesn't handle ac3 audio but would handle 5.1 aac)

I tried handbrake but the audio seems screwed up (as in it plays back in VLC, but it's lower than its supposed to be -- voices are lower, etc., as if someone slowed down the audio-- maybe it's a codec issue).

In any case, if there are others here that are doing the media center thing (and not just playing the DVD's VOB files from the hard drive)-- do your video files have surround sound and how did you convert your DVDs to have surround?

[production_coordinator]

You can compress your video using DivX or whatever... and simply keep the audio. I've done it using ffmpegX, and it really isn't that difficult. I like having my videos near DVD quality, so I use DivX format at a high setting and passthrough for audio. I can kinda tell it's not DVD, but not by much. The files are around 2-3 GB per.

[Rumz]

Have you played said-files in Front Row? There should be an Intel Mac divx extension for quicktime if I remember correctly. I guess the issue I was having was that the audio wasn't playing back properly when it was decoded by my amplifier.