The following guide tells you how to rip Blu-ray Disc to Apple TV meanwhile extract the AC3 audio track. The Apple TV can not decode AC3 5.1 codec? It doesn’t matter, because it is able to optically pass through the AC3 audio to your AV receiver that decodes Dolby Digital. Actually AAC 5.1 is a better choice when your receiver supports the AAC codec.
Step 1. Load Blu-ray Disc to Pavtube Rip Blu-ray Disc software for converting BD to Apple TV.
Click “BD/ DVD Folder” and navigate to the Blu-ray BDMV folder, click “Choose”. When the Blu-ray is loaded to Blu-ray Ripper, you can select subtitles and audio track (English, French, German, Spanish…) for each chapter. Forced subtitles can be attained, too (learn more about forced subtitles in Avatar Blu-ray).
Step 2. Set an Apple TV format that is encoded with H.264/ AC3.
Click on “Format” bar to select output format. Here you are advised to follow “HD Video”and select “H.264 HD Video (*.mov)”. Under the tab of “Apple TV” there are Apple TV optimized formats with AAC 5.1 and stereo audio, but here we do not use these formats.
Step 3. Customize the formats to be optimal for Apple TV and set AC3 5.1 track.
Click on “Settings” and you could further customize video and audio parameters. For Blu-ray to Apple TV conversion, optimal settings should be Video Size- 1280*720 (for a 16:9 screen), Video Bitrate- 4000kbps at highest quality, Video Frame rate- 24fps or 30fps, Audio codec- ac3, Audio Sampling rate- 48000hz, Audio Bitrate- 160kbps, Audio Channels- 6 Channels, just as it shows in below picture. Don’t forget to click on “OK” to confirm your settings.
Step 4. Start ripping Blu-ray to Apple TV video with Dolby Digital 5.1 track
Click on “Convert” button to start Blu-ray to Apple TV conversion on Mac.After conversion you can click “Open” button to get the final ripped Blu-ray files (H.264/ AC3 MOV videos).
Step 5. Play 5.1 Blu-ray movie with Apple TV and AV receiver.
Connect Apple TV with your Mac. Open iTunes, find the Movies library of Apple TV in DEVICES, and drag the converted Blu-ray movies to the Movie library of Apple TV. Or you may copy the movies to iTunes Library and sync them to Apple TV in batches. When playing ripped Blu-ray movie with Apple TV, make sure an optical cable is used to pass through AC3 5.1 track to your AV receiver. Some folks find audio is missing while video plays fine. This is because they are using Analog audio ports to output audio instead of Optical digital audio port, or the connected AV receiver/amplifier does not support AC-3 decoding.