Hi there everyone, I'm pretty much a newbie to this so excuse my ignorance.

I've got a folder of ac3 surround sound files, and I would like to get them onto my dvd player and the speakers.

What I'm trying to find out is: do the files get written to a cd or a dvd, in which case is there a certain file structure involved?

Thanks in advance.

Depends only on your player...

I should have explained better. The player is fine, it can handle most things thrown at it, it's just what format to write the cd/dvd I'm unsure about.

Plain data dvd of course.

So just the ac3 files burnt to the top layer of the DVD?
Sounds too simple to me (but there again, I'm pretty simple)

"to the top layer"...
What are you talking about???

Chef, do you have to be so rude? I came to this forum for help, not abuse.
Top layer , is the next level down from the name of your disc to most people who know about computers.

Top layer is the side where you can write or print something onto a media, it is not for burning...

Well despite the weird "top layer" stuff I want to assume that everyone is somewhat familiar where data is being written and read. So please back to the actual topic:

The problem is neither any mode used for recording nor any structure but the fact, that most players likely want to get the AC3-stream embedded into a video object container (VOB) and not rawly.

Extempore two possible solutions come into my mind. The one to be chosen depends on the way of decoding the AC3 to PCM. This can be done by the internal processor of the DVD-Player or by an external device, connected via S/PDIF. In the first case, playback should be possible by multiplexing the AC3 together with a 'dummy' (black) video and the properly padding, time stamps, etc. to build a fully compatible video-stream. Of course, technically this isn't the cleanest thing. But so the second wasn't either: You can create an audio-cd, built from the AC3 files - which are blown up and embedded into regular PCM data which every audio-player can play. An external decoder should be able to recognize the "white noise" pcm-data as what it actually is (same for dts, by the way so please refer to the "Creating DTS Cd" thread also). When using DVDs, you have to add wave headers and declare the files as "wav". However - same here: Many players won't play wave-files they get from a file system, although this would be possible without any problems (thanks to lame programmings).

The probably best solution (as in most cases) would be to use a computer to get the data to an external DAC.

Without being facetious; why don't you just play the original DVD and turn the TV off?

A folder of ac3 files? I take it these are on your PC?

If so, just burn them to a blank DVD or CD and pop it into your DVD player and you should be able to play them.

...depending on the used player/standlone.

I happen to have a portable DVD player that is capable of playing a mp3 and mpeg files (as well as other formats) on a data CD or DVD. MPEG files of course include VOB files. I discover this fact when I accidentally burned the files for a Video-DVD on the root of the disc instead of putting them in the VIDEO_TS folder where they are suppose to go. The player read the disc and displayed all of the VOB file for the DVD I had burned. I was able to play them like they were ordinary video files as well as change audio and sub-picture settings on each file. Also I tried burning a MPEG-2 encoded video file that had a PCM audio stream and had the .mpg extention. The player played the video but failed to play the audio encoded with it. My guess is that it was looking for the standard MPEG audio since it was a .mpg file.

What I'm trying to say is that if you have tried just burning the AC3 files to a disc and they did not play in your DVD player then try renaming them to .VOB instead and maybe they will work then. If that doesn't work you can try and mux each AC3 file with black video of the same length (you can use Nero Vision Express to create the video, if you want help with this just ask) and burn them as .VOB files and try again. You can use either a CD or DVD this way (whichever can hold all the files). This method will only work if your DVD player is capable of reading MPG files on a disc and will save you some trouble of converting your ac3 files to some other format if you don't want to do that kind of thing.

Sorry for rambling but I like to give as much info as I can in one post so hopefully this helps. Also I would suggest you use RW discs until you find out what works.

little-endian, yes I know that I somewhat repeated a suggestion you said but I didn't read your entire post before submitting this one (and have made a few changes since reading it)