I haven't posted much recently, due to being busy with various things, but I haven't forgotten. ;)

Actually I've had a rather exciting new development, in that I now have access to official Dolby software, which means I can upmix with real Prologic II and record the result directly into Pro Tools. (This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time, but only now have finally been able to make it happen.) I'm currently running tests to determine how much of an improvement this would be over the existing 5.1 mix; if it's to my liking, then a new version will soon be on its way.

The main potential benefit of this would be improved separation—less leakage of sound from one channel to another. There have been occasional comments about it being an issue, so this should help on that account. I may edit the LFE track ever so slightly, but on the whole it will still be virtually identical to the previous mix.

I'm also able to make use of the official AC3 encoder. When I tested it in comparison to the freeware version I'd been using before, the improvement in quality was immediately apparent. I've learned that this is because there are various coding tricks Dolby came up with to improve efficiency, resulting in superior sound at the same bitrates, which unofficial encoders do not duplicate even though they produce output compatible with the AC3 spec. The improvement over the previous version is most obvious for 5.1 at 448 kbps (which is most significant for the DVD), but every track will certainly benefit from this, so I consider it highly necessary.

On the lossless front, I can encode in both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA, so I suppose it comes down to whichever one has greater compatibility. I know that VLC can play any Dolby file but not DTS, due to licensing issues or some such, but I don't know what other people use to watch HD files on their computers, or what works best with mkv in general.