Thanks for the reply, Azazel.
Azazel wrote:As for the HE-AAC v1, its a valid M4A Audio stream which is what were aiming for, now this is a standard that has been around since 2003, its a more efficient encoder for audio, its widely used as is the standard for DAB radio
The fact people are playing them on a PS3 shows that they are compatible with this profile, MPC-HC is compatible, I have no idea on other players, but if they arnt compatible after 7 years, they are seriously out of date for playing anything.
Here's the thing though, are you sure it's fully compatible, or have you just checked if it's working? HE-AAC has 2 components, a half-bitrate AAC-LC baseband stream for the mids and lows (so in this case it would be a 40kbps stream), and then a second Spectral Band Replication stream for the highs. Basically anything that can play AAC-LC can play the baseband stream as a fallback method, but the result is that the quality sucks.
It's interesting that you say MPC-HC supports it though, as in my experience it doesn't. Looking at what MPC-HC is feeding me, it doesn't seem to have any idea that it's an HE-AAC stream, as it's only reporting the baseband stream.
Indeed it would be unexpected for most pure video players to support HE-AAC, because it's a codec that's usually used for radio-like purposes. SBR mangles things some, but it's the best thing out there at 64kbps and below that's suitable for music. But when it comes to pairing it with video, AAC-LC is used because it's otherwise a higher quality codec at normal bitrates, the implication being that since you have a much larger video stream that you don't need to cut corners on the audio stream.
Because of that I would stick with 128kbps AAC-LC for the HD encodes for compatibility and quality reasons, but that's just my $0.02.
