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Audio Format

DTS

Digital Theater Systems Audio

DTS (Digital Theater Systems) is a family of lossy and lossless surround sound audio formats found in commercial cinemas, DVDs, Blu-rays, and game consoles. The original DTS codec operates at up to 1.5 Mbps — over twice the bitrate of standard Dolby Digital — while DTS-HD Master Audio is fully lossless. DTS is particularly popular for action movies and music Blu-rays where high-fidelity multichannel audio matters.

What is DTS?

Developed by Digital Theater Systems (now Xperi) and first used commercially in Jurassic Park (1993), DTS uses a time-domain algorithm to encode up to 5.1 channels of surround sound. Unlike Dolby Digital (AC3) which uses a frequency-domain approach, DTS opts for higher bitrates rather than more complex psychoacoustic modelling. The DTS family includes: DTS (lossy, up to 1.5 Mbps), DTS-ES (6.1 channels), DTS-HD High Resolution Audio (lossy, up to 6 Mbps), and DTS-HD Master Audio (lossless, used on Blu-ray). Modern formats include DTS:X, an object-based format competing with Dolby Atmos.

DTS pros and cons

Advantages

  • Higher bitrate than Dolby Digital — less compression at standard settings
  • DTS-HD Master Audio is fully lossless (bit-perfect on Blu-ray)
  • DTS:X is object-based with height channels (like Atmos)
  • Widely supported by AV receivers and home theatre systems
  • DTS Play-Fi enables wireless multi-room audio
  • Available in cinema, disc, broadcast, and streaming contexts

Limitations

  • Not supported natively by iOS/Apple devices
  • DTS audio in MKV/MP4 won't play on most smartphones without conversion
  • Higher bitrate means more disc space than equivalent Dolby Digital
  • Lossless DTS-HD MA requires compatible AV receiver or processor
  • Lossy DTS quality advantage over Dolby Digital is marginal in practice

When should you convert DTS files?

Convert DTS to AAC when you need to play the audio on an iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, or Android device — these platforms don't support DTS passthrough. Convert DTS to AC3 when your AV receiver or streaming device supports Dolby Digital but not DTS. Convert DTS-HD MA to FLAC if you want a universal lossless format accessible outside the Blu-ray disc ecosystem. Keep DTS when watching through an AV receiver or home theatre system that supports DTS decoding — conversion to AAC stereo discards the surround sound information.

Convert DTS files

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DTS FAQ

Why does my video have no sound when the audio is DTS?
Most phones, tablets, and computers cannot decode DTS audio. The video player either outputs silence or drops to a lower-quality fallback track. Fix: use VLC (which software-decodes DTS), or convert the DTS audio to AAC using FFmpeg: ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c:v copy -c:a aac -b:a 256k output.mp4
Is DTS better than Dolby Digital?
The standard DTS codec uses a higher bitrate (up to 1.5 Mbps vs 640 kbps for Dolby Digital), which theoretically means less compression and better quality. In controlled listening tests, most people cannot reliably distinguish them. Both have been superseded by their lossless variants on Blu-ray: DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD.
What is DTS-HD Master Audio?
DTS-HD Master Audio is the lossless variant of DTS used on Blu-ray discs. It provides bit-perfect audio — identical to the studio master — at up to 24.5 Mbps. Compatible Blu-ray players pass the lossless bitstream to AV receivers via HDMI for hardware decoding. If your receiver doesn't support DTS-HD MA, the player decodes it to PCM instead.
How do I extract DTS audio from a Blu-ray?
Use MakeMKV to rip the Blu-ray to an MKV container, preserving the DTS-HD MA audio track intact. Then use eac3to or FFmpeg to extract the audio: ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0:a:0 -c:a copy output.dts. For lossless WAV/FLAC output: ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0:a:0 output.flac

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