What is AC3 - Audio Code Number 3

AC3, What is it?


Remember that video and audio is seperated in two or more streams in a video file. Video files can require multiple code drivers(Codecs) to play back both the video portion and the sound portion of a video file.

Dolby-Digital or AC3 Software codec, is a muti-channel music compression technology that has been developed by Dolby Laboratories. It compresses the audio portion of the video file, decreasing the amount of storage space that the audio portion of the stream needs with out losing major quality loss.

Sound recordings are only a good as it's source, if you have a movie that uses AC3 and has poor quality audio, it's likely that the source was poorly recorded. You can boost the sound quality a bit using the AC3 software settings.

How can I get the Codec

If you are missing the AC3 sound codec, it's probably because it isn't shipped as part of the operating system, or most legacy sound cards. It is very simple to get it. Install the free player from DIVX and the AC3 codec will get installed.

How do I know it's not installed.

If you have downloads a MP4 or an AVI extension file and the sound is missing but the video is playing in Windows Media Player, the chances are that you are missing the sound software driver.

Why else would I need to make sure I have this.

Making sure that you have the AC3 sound installed before you start converting files from DVD to other formats is important. You're convertion software will be looking for the codec to process the audio streams. Missing a codec can result in video files missing sound after the conversion process.

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