Down the IT Rabbit Hole

In this first part of the two part blog post, I am going to cover doing the initial setup of the Raspberry PI. The second part of the post covers setup of shairport (for AirPlay Audio). Prerequisites: Understanding Why? You may want to do this if you use iTunes or an iOS device and want to be able to stream audio to a stereo that has a "Line-In" capability. AirPlay stereo devices as well as AirPort devices can be costly. What to Get (all items I bought from MicroCenter ): ·        Hardware: o     Required: §    Raspberry PI Model B ($29.99 – on Sale) §    SD Card 6GB minimum (8GB Samsung Class 6 SDHC $5.99) §    Micro USB cable for power or Micro USB AC adapter ($6.99) §    HDMI cable and Monitor or TV (for initial installation only) §    USB Keyboard (for initial installation only) §    3.5mm Audio cable that can go to the stereo of your choice o ...

Handbrake seems to have an issue with DTS 4.0 encoded audio (at least on the Edward Scissorhands Blu-Ray). After the conversion I noticed the right audio channel not mapped properly during conversion which had sound effects but no audio coming from the right speaker. My target for the audio from Handbrake is generally AAC@160kbps with a Pro Logic 2 Mixdown and a second track for AC3 @ 640kbps with a Pro Logic 2 Mixdown as well (I would have 6 channel discrete but this is a 4 channel track only). To fix this there are a couple of ways, but on MacOS there is actually a solution. Download the ffmpeg command line from  http://ffmpegmac.net  (ffmpegx has issues with multi channel audio and is not maintained). Run the command line: ffmpeg -i INPUT.mkv -acodec ac3 -ac 4 -ar 48000 -ab 640k OUTPUT.ac3 Use mkvtools to add the audio track to the original MKV file. Open the MKV using Handbrake and choose the new AC3 audio track instead of the DTS one. After conversion, ...