DVD audio sync: Is there a solution?

[jcat]

More than a year ago someone posted the following to one of the forums. The answers s/he got were woefully inadequate. I've been struggling w/VHS to DVD sync issues forever, it seems - it appears that the MPEG-2 I'm capturing is sync'ed fine (so I assume this means a Time Base Corrector wouldn't solve the problem), but put it into an authoring program and it all falls apart, regardless of whether I demux or not - so I thought I'd pose the question again to see if anyone has anything new to offer that doesn't require me to take up DVD authoring as basically a second job.

I have been through a maze of posts from people with audio/video sync problems. I have played with video capture since the first Snazzi Mpeg capture cards, then Dazzle, then StudioDV, and on and on. Every product has its audio/video sync problems. Forums are full of people crying for help. There are tons of suggestions, you can spend lots of money on software and hardware, but the problems are ever continuing. I've read post stating to get a new sound card or video card, different brand of memory, disable your taskbar clock, and only eating well done foods. It all seems like a joke. I think all this software to make DVD's is only meant for making a 10-15 minute DVD. Anything over an hour, and the sync goes. Nothing really seems to solve it. I'm now using the latest MYDVD by Sonic, and naturally, sync problems galore. I almost went to and purchased Ulead Movie Studio, but see they too have sync problems. They offer a patch, which many have said doesnt work either. So whats the big fix? Do you have to buy those $1000 DVD programs to get results. I know it has to be possible to make a 2-hour DVD thats in sync, after all the dvd's you buy are in sync. You should not have to go through all this and still have no real solutions. BUYERS BE FORWARNED!!!

Any thoughts?

[Cirrus]

The only thing I can offer is the cure that worked for me.

I originally encoded my home movies with M2V (movie) and MPA (audio). I had a 250ms error with the audio. I then tried encoding the audio as WAV (PCM stream) and no more sync problem.

sorry, that's all I can offer...

[Squirell]

I had this problem many times before. Around 3/4 of the way through the movie it would go totally out of sync. The solution I use is to demux the video with Virtualdub and create a WAV file for the audio. You MUST make sure that under the audio settings you have selected Full Processing mode, otherwise you'll just get the same problem. If you have selected Full Processing mode you should get a WAV file around 1GB or more for a 1 to 1.5 hour movie. Then use TmpGEnc to create a DVD compliant mpeg file, use the original video file with the the newly created WAV file. This works EVERY time for me, even for converting DivX to DVD. Hope this helps.

[jcat]

My sync problem is arising in Movie Factory or TMPGenc DVD Author - my video appears to be synced fine after capture but before authoring. (And btw, does anyone know if this means that a Time Base Corrector won't help me?)

So let me make sure I understand what you're suggesting. I'm using Snazzi III USB to capture my video (VHS) directly to MPEG2 - so then I demux in VirtualDub, create a wav file for audio (not mp2 or mpa or whatever). So then I have a m2v file and a wav file. Then I use TMPGenc to encode back to MPEG2, with the wav file for audio and the m2v file for video. What settings do you use in TMPGenc - anything special?

This sounds like it's worth trying. I've been trying another fix I found somewhere on this site - NOT demuxing the MPEG2 file, but instead using the MPEG2 file as audio *and* video input into TMPGenc, and then using TMPGenc to re-encode it back into MPEG2, setting the audio to 48k and 224. Then authoring the resulting MPEG2 in Movie Factory (haven't tried doing it in TMPGenc DVD Author). This seems to have helped significantly, though I really do not understand why it should have any effect.

What I want is to be able to transfer my old VHS tapes to DVD without without getting a PhD in video capture and DVD authoring or devoting every spare moment to it! I just can't understand why, with all the people out there developing freeware and shareware and trialware, no one seems to have addressed this issue, since it seems to arise so often.