Best Quality from TV

Anyone able to help?

I haven't compared the two but optical out from my tv sounded great through my qute2

Some TV's disable optical out if HDMI is plugged in.   Also you may get lip sync issues.  Suck it and see.  A few guys use something the the uber cheap Fio or Maplin DACs to improve TV sound If they don't own a DAC already.

You can rip your dvd's to ISO or MKV and retain the audio quality.  There are free solutions like Handbrake and ready made pay for ones like My Movies.  Big topic lots of info on AV forums and blogs.  

Gus

Many thanks, people.  I'll try the optical from TV to Qute and use Handbrake. 

I was concerned with it when I saw that for audio it seemed to offer 128, 320 etc in the audio options and I did not want to rip down from DVD quality sound to MP3

Make MKV is also popular.  

You do realise that DVD sound is already lossy?   Any conversion to yet another lossy format will only make things worse.

Er, no.  I thought DVD sound was at least CD quality, 24/48 and all that

Afaik DD and DTS are lossy codecs but if you make an exact copy as an ISO or MKV file you will get no drop in sound quality.  it was to save space on the DVD I think.  The Blu Ray codecs DD HD and DTS HD are lossless codecs.  If you take the audio out from a DVD as PCM then that would be CD quality and uncompressed.  

Toslink out from TV is generally a good solution, which a lot of folk use to upgrade TV sound.  Being optical, lipsync isn't normally too big an issue - but that is a bit of a random thing anyway, which can be a bother even with a "bare" TV.

RCA out from your DVD player is another option, but depending on what your player is, its potentially less good than optical into the Qute, due to DAC quality.  If the DVD player has no digital out, then ripping the discs and using the TV as the player with optical out should give the best result.

+1 for Makemkv

We take the sound via optical from our TV to our SuperNait DAC. Works very well, with no lipsync issues. Fortunately the new TV manages to convert and output everything in PCM, regardless of source, whereas the old TV did not, requiring a more complex arrangement.

I use optical out directly from TV and from Blu-Ray player into a DAC-V1.  I have found that HDMI audio into the TV, and then fed back out of the TV optical out is adversely affected, hence the direct connection to Blu-Ray player in addition to the TV.  No blind tests involved. ;-)  

That was going to be my advice too.

(I use a long toslink cable from my Samsung TV to my Qute2 -- works just fine, once I got the Samsung output in the right format (only 2 choices; default was wrong and I got white noise).)

You don't get lip-sync issues by bypassing the TV with your audio?

Generally no, though it does happen very occasionally, but I am not sure that this due to the route the audio is taking, as 99% of the time it seems fine.  I don't know why it does happen, but I've always done things this way, even before the dac came along, I used the Blu-ray rca out directly to the amp, rather than involve the TV in the mix.  Is this something you have found to be an issue?

On the topic of lip-syncing, I have found this to be increasingly a RPITA, irrespective of system configuration, and hard to fix through manual adjustments.....

I notice that some of the more upmarket, modern AVRs claim to have auto lip-sync correction.  This would be like nirvana, but I can't for the life of me imagine how it might work. Obviously the adjustment is easy enough, but how would an AVR know what was going on with the picture (in relation to the audio) in order to calculate the delay ?  Anyone have insight to this ?

I have not experienced lip-synching problems on cable broadcasts, only when I stream Netflix, and I assume it's due to buffering. I have no educated insight on the issue, though on the surface it seems synching the audio and video on a digital broadcast would be a less paramount task than on an all-analogue broadcast. We didn't have this issue in the analogue days when the TV and speaker were a self-contained unit. The complexity must arise from broadcasts now needing to be fed simultaneously in various formats (stereo, 5.1) and through interminable permutations of gear by the end-user. Software that could fix all that seems like a good selling point for the manufacturer.

A easy way to  keep 100% of Picture and Sound quality is using AppGeeker DVD Ripper. It has never let me down.

http://www.appgeeker.com/conve...-dvd-to-mkv-mac.html

With AppGeeker the Main Movie is backup in a single MKV container on your hard drive, you can choose to keep all wanted Audio and subtitle tracks, and uncheck all tracks you don't want to keep The resulting MKV is slightly smaller than the DVD itself.

Yes, we have had occassional (but very noticeable) problems with lipsync when streaming Netflix. Shutting it down and restarting the stream has fixed it. The issue seems (to me) to be in the feed from Netflix, rather than in anything we are doing, but might be due to some sort of local buffering issues.