How do I extract eac3 dd+ audio to mono wavs?

[yoda313]

Ok Here's what I'm doing. I have pinnacle studio plus and I was able to take a hddvd evo trailer and mux it to m2ts with tsmuxer. Pinnacle studio plus was able to read the m2ts and I outputted to a wmv 720p file. It worked great on my xbox 360. Unfortunately it did not copy the audio.

I have read about using wm encoder 9 to encode 6 mono wavs to wma professional 10 5.1 audio and that will work well on a 360.

My problem is getting the high def ac3 audio converted to mono wavs.

I have downloaded tranzcode, headac3he, besweet, belight, eac3to and one or two others. These are all very complex and I haven't done this kind of audio work in a while.

I would like to know the procedure for doing this from an extracted ac3 file. I used tsmuxer to extract the original eac3 audio from the evo and it is on the harddrive as a ac3 file. The only problem is it seems the older ac3 conversion programs don't recognize it as ac3.

Are there any straight forward guides for any of the programs I've downloaded above? I am just a few steps away from having a usable process to go from hd-dvd to wmvhd for my xbox 360. I just need to be able to convert the surround sound audio and preserve the surround signal (yes I know I don't have a truehd compatible amplifier but I just want to keep 5.1, hd audio is not important to me).

Thanks in advance.

[poisondeathray]

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic363308.html

[yoda313]

Thanks poisondeathray. I'll give it a try and let you know.

EDIT - Each time I select the source file on the audio tab it minimizes the window and locks up (says script paused and the icon on the windows task bar has a blinking x). I'm using version 1.09 beta 10. This is vista compatible isn't it?

EDIT 2 - Ok I figured it out. I missed the step 1 of telling it where the program file for eac3to was. Seems kind of odd that it wouldn't know its own execute file is in its own directory. But anway it worked!

Thanks poisondeathray. Now I should be able to complete my audio conversion.

[poisondeathray]

what format is the "source file"? did you set the program paths? i don't know if it's vista compatible

[poisondeathray]

If you already have a 5.1 AC3, you don't need mono wavs

You can do this in WMNicEnc with avisynth straight from 5.1AC3

mono wavs are usually only required for dts encoding with surcode

[yoda313]

@poisondeathray - SOrry I edited my post. I got it working and got my wavs. Thanks. I missed the step of pointing it to its execute file.

Well I'm gonna try this with wme encoder 9 and see how easy it is.

[poisondeathray]

Yes, the gui is not offically supported.

The good thing about it is that you can edit the command line with the command line box

[yoda313]

You can do this in WMNicEnc with avisynth straight from 5.1AC3

Ok I'm stumped on the wmencoder process at the moment. I would like to try wmnicenc as I just downloaded and looks good.

I must admit though I have never used avisynth or at least only once or twice if I did. How would I go about this?

EDIT - I got the wme9 going. I had to fool around with some settings for it to figure out what I was doing. I'm just finishing the second pass. I foolishly added the video instead of just doing the audio and muxing it with stream editor. I'll do that next time to save extra work on the video. I'm hoping this works because I'll have a good process if it does.

EDIT 2 - Ok I got sound but it's horribly out of synch. Looks like I'll try this again audio only then mux.

[poisondeathray]

Write this in notepad, change the extension from .txt to .avs (also adjust for filenames, paths)

LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\NicAudio.dll")
NicAC3Source("myac3file.ac3")

In wmnicenc, disable the video, and select WMA10, you can choose bitrate , 5.1 etc....

It will give you a .wma file. Use solveig asf muxer (there is a free working beta version floating around if you search) on your .m2ts or .mkv to generate a video only .asf (if you have pulldown flags you might want to remove them with eac3to first). You can rename that to .wmv if you want. Use windows media stream editor to mux video & audio.

What you want to do is outlined in this thread. There are several methods outlined, some have better success with running an intermediate wmvmuxer step.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=119785

cheers

[yoda313]

@poisondeathray. Thanks. I'll try that on my next test later.

However I was able to get a wma from the mono wavs and tried muxing with windows media encoder stream tool. However the file that comes out is horribly out of sync. At least 2 to 3 seconds worth.

Is there a way to recalibrate the delay on the wma file that wme 9 creates? Because the odd thing is the file length is reported correctly - the exact same length as the video. So ideally they should be in perfect synch. At least in my world.....

[poisondeathray]

I don't use wme , so I don't know how to do that...

You could try adding the delay with eac3to during the creation of the mono wavs. In the GUI, it is in the audio tab right hand upper corner

You could also add the delay to the ac3 file with delay cut

In the wmnicenc method you just add the delay with DelayAudio(0.200) (in this example, there is a 200ms delay)

when you open the original .m2ts or evo directly with eac3to it should give you the delay values of each audio track. you could use it directly on the original file

[yoda313]

Thanks poisondeathray. I looked it up and tsmuxer says the delay is -70. Is that what I should use then?

[poisondeathray]

well something else is going on, because your observed 2-3 second delay doesn't correlate with the reported 70ms delay

You can "shift" the audio using asfbin (the older 1.5 version works better). It will give you .asf but you can rename to .wmv. I would just use that on your muxed video since audio & video are the same length

[yoda313]

Ok thanks. I need to take a break from this for a little bit. I started this latest session last night and resumed it this morning and its now early afternoon.

I might try something different this time. Now that I can reliably make wma 5.1 tracks i think might redo my process flow.

What started this was that Pinnacle Studio 12.1 plus did not pick up the audio correctly from the m2ts muxed file I got from tsmuxer (from the original evo trailer). My thinking now is to go back to that muxed m2ts and replace the audio with the wma 5.1 track I know have. My thinking is to use the undelayed one. Since they are both the same length as the original muxed m2ts they should theoretically synch perfectly. I'm hoping that pinnacle plus accepts wma 5.1 audio.

EDIT well it does seem to take 5.1 wma audio. Whether or not it actually retains the 5.1 I'm going to find out.

I'm so close to getting the audio in synch. I'm using the timeline to trim and move the audio around. Its really close now. I'm wondering if the preview audio seems to be off because Pinnacle isn't a great media player? I mean its not designed for that so maybe its not playing efficiently? Fortunately its a short two minute trailer so I won't lose a days worth of encoding to find out its still out of synch. THis willl probably be a half hour or so.

I will be interested in seeing how it plays on my 360. The wmv hd clip I downloaded the other night played perfectly on my xbox and with 5.1 audio no problems. That is my goal here.

[Midzuki]

I'm wondering if the preview audio seems to be off because Pinnacle isn't a great media player? I mean its not designed for that so maybe its not playing efficiently?

I presume the sync issues in WMA files are related to both VfW and DirectShow themselves.
Unless the playback software uses decoding libraries which are not based on either of those
problematic APIs, loss of sync after format conversions should not be unexpected.

P.S.: Good-luck!

\\\\

[yoda313]

@midzuki - thanks for the insight.

Well it did complete fairly quickly on the trailer. However the resulting file was still out of synch. But I'm happy that the file when burned to cd and played on the xbox 360 did produce a clean picture and 5.1 audio - albeit with the previously mentioned synch issues.

I'm temporarily shelving this project.

I'm going to try to get a dvd to wmv with 5.1 in full 720x480. What I want to do is to be able to rip dvds and get a 6-7 gig wmv file with 5.1 for my 360. I'm still planning on buying macdrive 7 (so I can use hfs and no 4gig fat32 limit on my 320gb external drive) and for 50.00 I want to make sure I can still make use of it if its going to take me awhile to get the hd-dvd synch issues straightened out.

Another project I will work on is taking an honest to goodness bluray of mine and going for the wmv hd conversion with 5.1. I'm more hopeful that since bluray won and all the conversion tools are now being geared for real m2ts formats that this should be much easier and more successfull. Then I could have the fun of playing bluray's on my xbox 360!