Greetings and salutations to all! A quick observation on BeSweet's AC3 encoding:

I've been capturing some old VHS tapes recently in an effort to move my home collection totally onto DVD. Naturally, part of this process is the conversion/encoding procedure. I've never had a problem encoding the video portion through TMPG, but I was a bit irritated by BeSweet's apparent problem with encoding WAV files into DVD-compliant AC3 files.

The problem? After encoding, the AC3 file is only 60% the volume level of the original WAV file.

On the computer speakers, that's a huge difference. I was very annoyed because I had cleaned and normalized all the captured audio in preparation for DVD-encoding and I wanted the volume to be as strong as possible without distortion.

I read dozens of forum posts of others having this same problem, and though they found a way to 'fix' the problem in other programs such as Vegas Video and Soft Encode, I don't have either of those programs. I was intent on getting BeSweet to do this correctly!

For the heck of it I left the AC3 at the 60% volume and just burned the DVD project.

When I tested it on the TV, WHOA - it sounded fantastic! Even though it had sounded very quiet on the PC speakers, on the TV the volume level was STILL louder than the original VHS tape I had captured off of.

It would appear as long as the volume level in the original WAV file is normalized before AC3 encoding, the final volume level ends up being more than adequate. Apparently our preception of volume level on the PC and TV are totally different - and if you think about it, when you watch a DVD movie on your PC, doesn't the volume seem very low compared to the rest of the PC sounds?

MY MORALE OF THE STORY, and one that I should have thought of before getting so frustrated - always test the DVD on a TELEVISION before worrying about any audio (or video) details on the PC.

Hope this helps some other BeSweet users.

Chow

W