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Not sure if this i the right place to ask my question but I'll give it a go. I extracted an E-AC3 Audio track with MKVExtractGUI. The output file I get was .eac3.

Another tool I used says it supports Dolby Digital Plus (which my audio track is btw) but when I want to import my eac3 file it says that it's not supported. By simply changing the extension to .ac3 it works flawlessly.

The main question I want to know is if this changes anything to my file? Obviously there is no re-encode but is something inaccessible through an extension-change ?

Edit: I know I could use MKVToolNix but this won't work for my use case.

AlphaInc.
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2 Answers2

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No, changing the filename extension has no effect on the data of file.

Scott - Слава Україні
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kaykay
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To understand the following text, it is important to know that the professional term for eac3 is Dolby Digital Plus and for ac3 is Dolby Digital.

The Wikipedia article for Dolby Digital Plus contains in the section Relation to Dolby Digital and Dolby Atmos the following:

Dolby Digital Plus bitstreams are not directly backward compatible with legacy Dolby Digital decoders. However, Dolby Digital Plus is a functional superset of Dolby Digital, and decoders include a mandatory component that directly converts (without decoding and re-encoding) the Dolby Digital Plus bitstream to a Dolby Digital bitstream (operating at 640 kbit/s) for carriage via legacy S/PDIF connections (including S/PDIF over HDMI) to external decoders (e.g. AVRs, etc.).

This means that although the program you used does not support Dolby Digital Plus, once it was told that it was a Dolby Digital file by changing the extension, it then managed to read it.

However, the quality has been degraded compared to what could have been achieved by native support for Dolby Digital Plus.

harrymc
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