Convert authored PCM audio DVD to MP2 audio to reduce size

[trossin]

I downloaded a demo of Sony's poor man's Vegas + DVD Architect and found that the menu editing tools were just what I wanted but the final output portion was disabled. Since I liked what I saw, I spent $90 and got the boxed version of the software. Now that I have the code I find out that it will only output PCM audio which blows up the size of my output disks. I could not find any mention on their web site that it only produced PCM VOBs. This makes me mad inside. If I give them $1000 they will "give" me AC3 support. How nice.

Is there a tool that can replace the audio tracks in a VOB and update the IFO files to deal with the smaller file size or did I just throw my money away? All the shrink tools like DvdShrink and dvd2one leave the audio alone so all they will do is destroy the video quality.

Thanks for any help

[redwudz]

If you just need 2 channel audio, you might try dropping the PCM into ffmpeggui and convert it to AC3, then combine it back in during authoring. AC3 is more compliant than MP2 and takes up less space. ffmpeggui is freeware and fairly fast.

[jman98]

BeSweet (I recommend using BeSweet GUI) can also convert WAV to AC3. Free solutions for AC3 encoding are considered inferior to commercial ones, but in truth in many cases they are good enough.

[trossin]

Thank redwudz and jman98 but the problem is that even if my source has AC3 or MP2 the evil Sony software will convert it to PCM during the authoring stage. Then I'm stuck with a VIDEO_TS folder that is too large to fit on a single sided disk. I'm looking for a method to hack the .VOB and .IFO files to replace the audio with the original audio so that I can maintain the menu structure. If I just use DvdShrink or dvd2one the video files will get trashed due to the compression done to the video and not the audio.

[Abond]

It may work (or not). Author a DVD without menu using for example Muxman with ac3 track. Then use Vobblanker to replace the vobs authored by Sony software with the vobs authored with muxman. The ifo's would be updated in the process. Hopefuly menues would work. Test with pgcedit in trace mode.

[trossin]

Thanks Abond. I'll give it a try.

[trossin]

That did the trick. VobBlanker is a way of life!