So you need thoughtful planning and careful selection before assembling your home theater makes the experience that much better, and this guide will show you how to plan and buy the right items to put together a good home theater that you will be proud to show it off.

• Top 5 Home Theater Systems with Dolby Digital
• Top 7 Home Theater Systems with Digital Tuners 

Building a Home Theater

Building a home theater requires the necessary home theater components, such as a TV, a surround sound system, a Blu-ray player, receiver, and furniture.

1. TV

When choosing your TV for your home theater, try to go for the largest screen you can afford. After all, if you want the full movie theater experience, size comes into play. Try to at least go with a 40 inch if you cannot afford larger. For best viewing, the distance between the viewer and the screen should equal about three times the screen size. So a 40-inch TV is best viewed from a distance of 120 inches.

2. Speakers

To reproduce the movie theater experience at home, you need the right audio too — usually five speakers and one subwoofer. Dolby Digital 5.1 breaks down audio into six speakers. Dialogue is sent to one of three front speakers, ambient sounds to a pair of rear speakers, and low-frequency base to the subwoofer.

3. Blu-ray Player

Do your research on what Blu-ray player is right for you. The popular choice to pick a player that has wi-fi, Netflix, Pandora and other apps installed. However, some Blu-ray players don’t offer free upgrade, some ones crash again and again when playing, some players can’t deal with the latest Blu-ray protection, and even some have complex workflow. So here an easy way to solve your problem.

Here is an alternative for Blu-ray Player. Pavtube ByteCopy is updated to perfectly rip and backup all Blu-ray movie discs, then to iPhone, iPod, iPod touch, Apple TV, Galaxy Tab S, Amazon Fire Phone, Surface Pro 3, or other devices. Meanwhile, it still gives breakthrough performance to convert Hollywood, Disney Blu-ray DVD movies for playing on mobile devices effortlessly.

4. Receivers

The receiver decodes signals from the player, satellite, cable and then routes them to the television and speakers.

5. Furniture

Choosing the right furniture for your home theater is important to keep that movie theater look. Choose home theater seating that will seat the appropriate amount of guests. Think about installing a TV wall mount to enhance the look of the TV. Tuck wiring and cables when possible to keep a low profile.

DTS-HD Master Audio or just DTS-HD is a combined lossless/lossy audio codec created by Digital Theater System, commonly used for surround-sound movie soundtracks on Blu-ray Disc. DTS-HD Master Audio may be transported to AV receivers in 5.1, 6.1 or 7.1 channels, at lossless quality, in one of three ways depending on player and/or receiver support.

It replaces the old DTS audio (actually it extends it) and its main goal is to allow a bit-to-bit representation of the original movie’s studio master soundtrack. If you are unaware with the lossless term, it is a compression method that allows you to have the exact original data from the compressed data after extraction, in contrast to lossy formats which only allows an approximation of the original data to be reconstructed. An example of a lossy audio format is MP3, while another lossless audio format is FLAC.

DTS-HD has pretty much become the standard audio track of most Blu-ray discs. That is why we will try to explain how it works, and of course, how you can rip it, in this article.

The DTS-HD Core and how the whole format works

As you can read in detail in the DTS-HD white paper the encoding process of a DTS-HD track in simple terms is the following: first the Core, which is lossy format, similar to the old DTS is being created. Then the Core is compared to the original audio and any parts found missing are being added an an extra “residual” stream. Then both streams are used to create the final DTS-HD MA track. That way in older decoders that only support the old DTS format, you just listen to the Core stream. In decoders that support DTS-HD, both the streams are being played in the same time giving you lossless original sound quality.

The advantages of this format are backwards compatibility with older decoders, smaller size of the audio track than using both an HD and a Core track and faster encoding.

What do you need to rip

First of all I assume you have at least a 5.1 sound system, otherwise you should just downmix to stereo. Now since there are only a few software decoders for DTS-HD and these at insane prices we can pretty much assume the following scenarios:

• If you have bought a software decoder or have a decoder that supports DTS-HD and you pass-through the audio through HDMI or Optical, just create an mkv file and maintain the original audio track from the Blu-ray.
• If you decode through your PC or you passthrough to a decoder that doesn’t support DTS-HD you don’t need both streams. Even if you keep the whole track, you will only listen to the Core, so just keep that and remove the HD audio. For instance, you might be able to decode DTS-HD in your PC but instead you pass-through the audio to your decoder via an optical cable. Your decoder will just play the Core.
• If you want to maximize compatiblity or reduce the size of the audio track you can convert to AC3 audio in a lower bitrate.
• If you are copying a Blu-ray to AVCHD, check your Blu-ray player’s manual. If it supports (most likely it will) DTS-HD keep it, otherwise follow one of the options above.
• Of course if you are converting to mkv in order to store your movie, keeping the DTS-HD format is a good idea. It will be easy to decode soon enough in any PC so take a minute and think about what you need.

Just to add my experience since I recently bought a DTS-HD sound system, if you listening to your movies in low – normal volume you really can’t tell any difference between the lossless DTS-HD and just the Core. If you starting increasing the volume, especially in action films you can tell some difference, but as the DTS-HD whitepaper says the Core is also a very capable lossy format and given the huge bitrate of 1500kbps that it usually uses, in most cases you are fine just ripping the Core.

What various ripping programs support

• Ripbot264 supports getting the Core stream. Just select Core when you import the Blu-ray and then copy stream in order to get the original Core audio. You can also demux the whole stream to Wave and then use Aften to convert to AC3.
• Handbrake also supports copying the Core stream. Choose the mkv container and in the audio options add DTS passthrough.
• Staxrip can get both streams if you select the DTS-HD option or otherwise rips just the Core if you select DTS. Using the Just Remux option you get the original DTS-HD or DTS Core streams in your mkv file and you can also convert to AC3. This is my program of choice due to the many and clear options of you for audio (just demux and remux, re-encode etc)
• Generally eac3to can deal with all those formats and give you any output you wish, Core or HD, just demux or recode to wave, flac etc. Then, you just mux the sound with your video file.
• Few Blu-ray Rippers on market can recognize DTS-HD MA, Pavtube ByteCopy is one of them. It supports both DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD. With it, you can copy Blu-ray to MKV with DTS 5.1 sound in all audio streams, as well as converting the audio to Dolby 5.1 surround sound.

What if I want to decode DTS-HD

You have to buy a commercial software like Pavtube ByteCopy, eac3to, Staxrip, Ripbot264, etc. that contains a decoder to decode DTS-HD.

What about Dolby TrueHD

Dobly TrueHD is the format competing with DTS-HD. It is less common but you will surely eventually buy a Blu-ray disc that uses TrueHD as the main audio format. Well, pretty much everything above applies for TrueHD as well with the exception of the software decoder which is free and included in ffmpeg. So you can decode the lossless part just fine and use it as a source for all your encodes. Most TrueHD streams also contain an AC3 stream (kind of like the Core DTS has). Pavtube ByteCopy can deal with that and either remove it or extract it. (you probably want to remove it anyway)

That’s about all the info you will need regarding DTS-HD Master Audio and you can learn more about Blu-ray audio here. If you have more questions just use the comments form below.