AAC vs Vorbis Audio for Encoding

[Ranma-kun]

Anyone try listening tests between these two? I did recently and found Vorbis seemed to do better than the faac and ffmpeg AAC codecs and the lame MP3 codec at most bitrates. I tested at various bitrates and sizes and Nero AAC seemed to be very close but Vorbis still seemed to come out on top except for the lowest bit-range range under 64kbps category in which HE-AAC v2 seemed narrowly better but I can't see encoding at bitrates that low anyway.

 

So I suppose the only issue for vorbis would be compatibility, it seems vorbis can be contained to the mkv format but might not be comparable with some media players that don't have the right codecs for it, i.e windows media player with no codec packs attached doesn't seem to play vorbis audio and just leaves you with a mute video.

 

I suppose it comes down to do you think the quality increase is worth the minor compatibility drop? Or do you think I am wrong and AAC is the better audio format? I would be open to your two cents on the issue.

[StaticX]

In all honesty, I use passthrough mode for encodes e.g. AC3, DTS/HD and if there isn't a passthrough option for certain types of audio, I just encode it in FLAC.

[Koby]

I tend to just pssthrough audio on dvds since they're audio typically in a lossy format (AC3).

If I do any audio encoding it's usually from Blu-ray where it's in lossless format, and then I typically encode to AAC.

2ch AAC I tend to encode between 192-320 kbps.

6ch AAC I tend to encode between 320-640 kpbs.

I tend to stay away from keeping lossless format audio; because that typically leaves the audio file size bigger than the compressed video and to me that's just silly. For a 30 minute show, my audio is typically around 30-100mb per track.

I don't encode to Vorbis and I have downloaded very few releases that have Vorbis audio. So I'm not too experienced with it and never really saw a need to switch from AAC and AC3.

Back in my xvid encoding days, I used 128kbps mp3 audio.

[Ranma-kun]

At 128kbps Vorbis is a rough equivalent to MP3 at 192kbps or AAC at 160kbps, or that's what I read on an audiophile forum anyway. I just thought it seemed efficient to use it given it has the best performance ratio.

 

If its not to big I agree with using pass-through though.

[khudea]

AAC encoded with QAAC will provide best results.