Several differently-sourced video streams to one DVD

[Mangetout]

OK, I'm a newbie here and a bit of a newbie to the whole world of video encoding etc in general. Please be gentle with me. I also have no budget for what I'm trying to achieve, which is bound to make it more complex.

I want to put a collection of video material onto a single DVD in PAL-playable format; trouble is, it's from a few different sources, such as:
- A music video that I created myself in EditStudio, built as uncompressed AVI, encoded with BBMPEG - PAL all the way on this one.
- Titles ripped from NTSC DVDs using two passes of DVDx - one to get a 48KHz audio stream, the other to get an MPEG2 stream - DVDx does something or other to the frame rate to make it compatible with PAL
- Titles ripped from PAL DVDs using, oh, I dunno, DVDShrink.

I'm using DVDStyler to author the DVD.

Troubles so far have been that the audio streams for each of the titles was in a different format; DVDx gives me AC3, BBMPEG converts my AVI to a stream multiplexed with MP2. On the first attempt, the DVD played alright, but the tracks that had MP2 audio were silent. (everything played at the right speed though, with no stutters, jumps or conspicuous frame drops etc).
So I tried converting the MP2 Audio to AC3 with BeSweet, but ended up with a mess, however, ffmpeg did it OK.

I'm now at the point where, for each of my titles, I have an M2V and AC3 - individually, these work OK (I had to tweak the audio timing, which I did In Cuttermaran, as I wanted to trim them anyway) and if I write any individual title to DVD, it plays just fine.

But if I put them all together, my domestic player just doesn't recognise it as readable.

I suppose it must be that there's something about the video streams that isn't gelling, but at the moment, I'm not sure how to diagnose it. How should I proceed?

[Baldrick]

does it work on your computer using software dvd player?

some few players has problems with ac3 encoded using ffmpeg.

maybe try some other authoring tool to see if dvdstyler is the problem.

[Richard_G]

Try going to www.Ulead.com and downloading the 30 day trial of DVD Workshop 2. It can cope with just about all formats of files and convert those that it needs to convert to DVD compliant. It can handle the whole process from capture to burn if you want it to or just the bits you need. Instead of burning, you can get it to create a VIDEO_TS folder with the files in it so you can check that it is going to work properly with a software player before committing it to disc.

[Mangetout]

Thanks for the replies so far; I'll test the disc on my laptop tonight to see if it plays there.

There's a new release of DVDStyler just out and it handles titlesets more intuitively; I'm thinking that I might try putting all of the NTSC-ripped stuff in one titleset, the PAL-ripped stuff in another and the homespun video in a third - looks like I can still launch them all from a single set of buttons on the vmMenu.