First off, please pardon me if I have any of this wrong. My mind is becoming a bit lost in a sea of audio/video formats and I am definitely a newbie on this board.

Anywho, the goal is to purchase an Apple TV and rip my old DVD's (I say old, as I don't expect to purchase anything other then BluRay going forward) to the "best" format for use with the Apple TV.

My research on the Apple TV has led me to the understanding that the "best" audio format supported by Apple TV will be that of Dolby Surround (4 channel) as can be seen at roughlydrafted (article entitled "Apple TV: iTunes Store Movie Quality...", link mangled due to spam restriction).

Note that the article also mentions that all of the iTMS movies are encoded with Dolby Surround, so they can be decoded as either 2 or 4 channel audio. This appears to be the format of choice for the Apple TV.

Moving on, my question now is: What software can I use to rip my DVD's and convert a 5.1 AC-3 track to a Dolby Surround 2/4 channel track? This would be preferred over just ripping the 2-channel stereo track and storing as non-Dolby Surround encoded 2-channel stereo. Does this software exist? Do I have this completely screwed up or am I on the right track? BTW, I already have all of my DVD VOB/etc files ripped with Mac the Ripper and stored on my hard drive.

Thanks in advance...