Burned DVD's that won't play audio, need to change to AC3.

[pedrohead]

hey there, first post, so be kind. i've got a few live concert dvd's that i've burned and found that my PS2 and computer will play them but my standalone (Toshiba SD-1600) doesn't recognize MP2 sound, so there's no sound.

i'd like to convert these to AC3 sound (the only sound my player will accept) which i know how to do with MPEG files that are on my drive, my question is...the dvd's that i already have with menus and chapters and everything, how can i get those demultiplexed, and remultiplexed back in TMPEGnc DVD encoder without losing all the menus and chapter info.

thanks for your help.

[wulf109]

I find it hard to believe your DVD player won't play mpa audio,I have two Toshiba DVD players and they both play mpa sound. One of them is from 1999 and doesn't support VCD but will play DVD made with mpa sound.
Many concert DVD 's use PCM(WAV) sound. Are you sure about the type of audio used. DVD spec supports ac3 and PCM. MPA is not officially supported but I've never seen a player that did not play it.
Are you NTSC or PAL? PAL officially supports mpa audio.

[pedrohead]

this is NTSC, and yes, it won't play MP2 sound. if you check under the dvd compatibility documents on this site for Toshiba SD-1600, it even says in there that this standalone will only play AC3 files.

[duhmez]

This is bad times and will be no fun. Suggest you trash that crappy player that doesnt suport mpa. In either case the difficulty will be based on how complex the menu is.

the program doitfast4u will allow you to emultiplex ecery aspect of the dvd, all angles/tracks/subtitles etc, and is free.
From jhere you can reencode your audio using besweet and reauthor with the program of your choice.

[wulf109]

The list says it doesn't play mp3,mp3 is adifferent format. To be DVD compatible it should be mpeg1-layer2. Is that format of the audio on your disk?

[spectroelectro]

A DVD with MPEG-2 video stream and mp2 audio stream is not strictly speaking compatible with the DVD spec. The DVD spec states that a DVD must have either a WAV audio track at 48 khz, or an AC-3 audio track, or AC-3 + mp2 audio, or AC-3 + WAV audio, or WAV + mp2 audio.
Most DVD players will play a DVD with mPEG-2 video + mp2 audio but not all.
To generate an AC-3 audio track, get BeSweet (freeware) from www.doom9.org and the AC3Machine GUI frontend. With that you can easily transcode the demuxed mp2 audio track into AC-3.
Because an MPEG-2 video + mp2 audio DVD is not striclty speaking kosher according to the full-on DVD specifications, a few DVD authoring apps won't even let you try to author a DVD if you feed in demuxed MPEG-2 video and mpa or mp2 audio streams. Other DVD authoring apps will let you feed in such elementary streams but will either transcode the mpa or mp2 to WAV or simply ignore it. So the problem could be your DVD authoring app.
Just use BeSweet to generate an AC-3 audio file from your mpa elementary audio stream and your problems should vanish.

[pedrohead]

like i mentioned in my post above, BeSweet has removed their support of XXX > AC3. apparently it was too buggy. so i'm not familiar with other authoring software other than TMPEG just cause that's what i've been using for conversion and what not. what other freeware/shareware authoring programs are out there that will do this conversion for you?

[daamon]

Hi pedrohead,

what other freeware/shareware authoring programs are out there that will do this conversion for you?

ffmpeggui - Easy to install, easy to use. Does various (including MP2) to MP2 and AC3. See here for full details.

And it's freeware.

[ricky1756]

i agree with daamon, i had the same provlem with my philip dvd player. ffmpeg is easy to use and does a great job

[daamon]

ffmpeg is easy to use and does a great job

I'd recommend actually downloading ffmpeggui as you get ffmpeg (run from a DOS window using user input switches - i.e. tricky) and the GUI that Baldrick has written for it.

@ ricky1756 - It may seem picky to point out ffmpeggui over ffmpeg, but I downloaded just ffmpeg to start with and wondered "where is this 'so easy' that everyone keeps on about?" before I discovered the GUI too. I wanted to save pedrohead the same pain.

[capvid0429]

Just for the hell of it, did you try going into the dvd player's setup program and try changing the audio to see if that works?