Audio lagging behind in a VCD! Why?

[PunkMaister]

I recently made a VCD with 2 Stargate fan films and to my sad surprise the sound was lagging behind horribly! Now if I play the AVI file it does not have that problem so what is going on and more importantly how can it be fixed?

I mean as in not happening again when I try to burn another copy that is...

[AlanHK]

Explain exactly what method and software you used to get from AVI to VCD. Then someone may be able to advise.

Can you burn DVDs, or only CDs?
There's more choice in software for DVDs these days.

[jman98]

AlanHK is 100% correct that we need more information.

Some possibilities I can think of:
1) Your audio in the fan films is VBR MP3 and it was improperly converted by whatever you used to make the VCD.
2) Your audio in the fan films is 22 KHz and whatever you used to make the VCDs botched the conversion to 44 KHz audio. In theory this conversion should not cause a sync problem, but I can't say it's impossible.
3) Your video bit rate is too high for VCD (it's supposed to be 1150 Kbps CBR - contstant bit rate - and definitely NOT any value above that. Lower values, if they are still CBR are technically OK.) and this caused a problem in the muxing of video and audio to produce the VCDs.
4) Whatever you used to make the VCD is crap and didn't do it correctly.

[Stiiv]

Try extracting the audio from your avi file into an audio editor like Goldwave or Sound Forge...save it to a 16-bit 44100kHz stereo wav file, then tell your VCD-making program to use the wav file instead of the avi's audio track when burning the VCD.

[PunkMaister]

Sorry 'bout the delay here's the deal:

a. I do not have a DVD burner if I did I would be making DVDs and not VCDs for sure.

b. What I do have is a DVD player/CD Burner combo from 2000 or so. I use Nero Express to burn my VCDs and this is honestly the very first time something this extreme happens.

c. Nero (6.6.0.15) express does not seem to have a way to place 2 separate audio and video files and them combine them into one.

d. While I had experienced this before with some individual AVI files it is most certainly the first time I see it happening with an encoded VCD and with an AVI that when played individually works just fine.

e. Now one possibility that has been suggested which has to to do with the audio track being MP3 is a tantalizing posibility given the fact that when I recompress files it is the audio format of choice (It saves the most space).

f. I do not think of Nero Express as being crap because this is the very, very first time that it fails me like this.. I've created plenty of VCDs before with no problems whatsoever.


OK if the problem is seemingly the MP3 audio track what then? Recompress the video under a new audio track format what? And if so which Audio tracks formats work best for encoding VCDs?

I will be creating a separate thread to ask how to deal with problems like this when it happens to individual AVI files as this is obviously not the place for it...

[tomlee59]

Re-read Stiiv's post -- he just gave you a valuable suggestion. Your problem may very well be audio related. So do what he says. You don't have to reencode the whole movie, just the audio. Demux what you've done so far, and throw away the audio stream. Convert your original audio track into .wav (for example), then convert that into mp2 at 44.1kHz sampling rate. Once that's done, then mux the video track with the new audio track and see if things are better. Audio conversions are fast, so this experiment can be completed quickly.

[AlanHK]

Nero doesn't have a good reputation. So most (every?) suggestion you get here will begin with "Ditch Nero".

So, there are some good, free, VCD production apps.

1) VCDEasy
2) VCDGear

Either of these will accept MPEG1 video and audio files and author them to make an ISO, which you burn with ImgBurn, Fireburner, or even Nero (Nero is fine at its original function, burning files).

To make the MPEG1 video from AVI, you can use TMPGenc. The MPEG1 production feature is free, only if you want MPEG2 (for DVDs) do you need the paid version.

If you still have audio problems, you could try creating the audio separately, eg with BeSweet, which can pull the audio directly out of the AVI and convert it to MP2.

OK if the problem is seemingly the MP3 audio track what then? Recompress the video under a new audio track format what? And if so which Audio tracks formats work best for encoding VCDs?

You have no choice, VCDs must be MP2 audio.
44100 Hz
224 kbit/sec MPEG-1 Layer2
See What is VCD?

If you meant what format will Nero convert best, I don't know.

[redwudz]

The first thing I would do is drop the original AVI into Gspot and post a screen shot of that. Or at least check in the lower left in Gspot to see if the little green 'VBR' box is lit up. MP3 VBR audio is common with 'AVI' type files and can cause sync problems when converted to MPEG. Gspot will also tell you quite a bit more about the video. If you would like to post a Gspot screen shot: http://forum.videohelp.com/topic271697.html

Like Stiiv said, you can convert the audio to WAV and use that for encoding. One method is VirtualDub to convert to WAV, then Mux it back with the video before encoding.

If it's not MP3 VBR, then there are the other causes mentioned.

And welcome to our forums.

[jman98]

Sorry 'bout the delay here's the deal:

f. I do not think of Nero Express as being crap because this is the very, very first time that it fails me like this.. I've created plenty of VCDs before with no problems whatsoever.

There are people who believe that the Apollo moon landings were staged on soundstages in the desert. People believe all kinds of crap. Just because YOU believe Nero Express is OK does not mean the majority of us here share your opinion. You might want to consider the possibility that you are wrong about Nero Express.

By the way, Nero is freaking NOTORIOUS for generating audio sync problems when it converts AVIs to ANY format at all. Of course if you prefer to believe that Nero is great and it can't be the problem and we are all wrong about wonderful Nero, then go ahead. None of us are going to lose sleep about it because it's not OUR problem and it's not our fault you don't like what we told you.

Nothing personal and sorry to be blunt, but we see guys like you all the time who get married to a piece of hardware of software and then refuse to believe that it's crap, even when the evidence points to this conclusion.
The fact that Nero never failed you before doesn't mean that it's not crap - it just means you were lucky. We provided a plausible explanation for a problem that you have no explanation for. It's up to you to either ignore that good advice or to use it. Your solution - don't use Nero for this kind of work. By the way, the archives are filled with posts of people crying about how Nero didn't covert something correctly for them, so I'm not just talking smack here. You should also know that Nero truly sucks for encoding video to VCD and tests have shown it to be among the very worst choices for good video quality output.

[PunkMaister]

Sorry 'bout the delay here's the deal:

f. I do not think of Nero Express as being crap because this is the very, very first time that it fails me like this.. I've created plenty of VCDs before with no problems whatsoever.

There are people who believe that the Apollo moon landings were staged on soundstages in the desert. People believe all kinds of crap. Just because YOU believe Nero Express is OK does not mean the majority of us here share your opinion. You might want to consider the possibility that you are wrong about Nero Express.

By the way, Nero is freaking NOTORIOUS for generating audio sync problems when it converts AVIs to ANY format at all. Of course if you prefer to believe that Nero is great and it can't be the problem and we are all wrong about wonderful Nero, then go ahead. None of us are going to lose sleep about it because it's not OUR problem and it's not our fault you don't like what we told you.

Nothing personal and sorry to be blunt, but we see guys like you all the time who get married to a piece of hardware of software and then refuse to believe that it's crap, even when the evidence points to this conclusion.
The fact that Nero never failed you before doesn't mean that it's not crap - it just means you were lucky. We provided a plausible explanation for a problem that you have no explanation for. It's up to you to either ignore that good advice or to use it. Your solution - don't use Nero for this kind of work. By the way, the archives are filled with posts of people crying about how Nero didn't covert something correctly for them, so I'm not just talking smack here. You should also know that Nero truly sucks for encoding video to VCD and tests have shown it to be among the very worst choices for good video quality output.

Wow! I was just sharing my personal experience with the program and by the way no one especifically had mentioned Nero either. Someone just suggested that the program I was using could be a crappy one as the reason for the problem. Now that I've cleared that, the programs I've been suggested are only now avaliable as extremly limited try out freeware that only works for a little while. Does anyone have links to the older nearly fully featured versions of this programs?

[AlanHK]

the programs I've been suggested are only now avaliable as extremly limited try out freeware that only works for a little while. Does anyone have links to the older nearly fully featured versions of this programs?

Which programs? The ones I linked to have the free versions on the pages autolinked.

[tomlee59]

VCDgear is totally free. The newest versions of VCDeasy are not, but if you look a few lines down from the linked page, you'll see a link to an older, free version of VCDeasy. And as AlanHK mentioned, TMPGenc is free for MPEG1 conversions (which is the case here).