TMPGENC dvd author.....music in menus

[motley]

i have 3 epsiodes of a TV show and i have made an mpeg of that TV shows title music.
when i use the title mpeg as a motion menu it has no audio,but the video is fine.
I have ticked the add BGM to motion menu box.
any suggestions much appreciated

[northcat_8]

The audio needs to be in the video file when you encode the menu to MPEG-1.

If there is still no audio, are you sure the audio is absent or is the volume just really low?
:red: I've done that before.

[motley]

i have checked out the mpeg in windows media player......audio is there.....i made the mpeg exactly as i made the mpegs for the tv episodes and the audio is present on those

[mats.hogberg]

Also, for TDA menus, the audio has to be one particular format (don't remember which at the mo, but it could be AC3) - not all video DVD audio formats are supported, for some strange reason.

/Mats

[steveryan]

It has to be MP2.

[videopete]

Sorry, never worked for me either - no matter what I did....I just live with the video motion menu with no audio....

[northcat_8]

don't know what to tell you.

I always encode my motion menus to MPEG-1 format, the audio is in there and I let TDA to the rest, never had a problem.

sorry I couldn't be more help.

[motley]

i encoded the title clip with TMPGEnc dvd author just as i did with the episodes,thats the part i dont get because the episodes have great sound and so does the clip when i view it in any other player on th computer

[nic2k4]

I had that problem the first time I tried to use a musical background. I finally got it to work, by downloading the free version of TMPGEnc to create the MPEG1 for the menu. I found that using the multiplexing tools to mux a video and audio stream didn't work. Encoding using the same video and audio sources worked.

[motley]

i got it to work.......i reauthored the menu background with interwin dvd maker.......apparently the sound format was AC3 and i reauthored it to MPEG1........its still odd cos the episodes work and they are AC3......but i am up and running

[mats.hogberg]

Not sure if it's a TDA quirk (I think so, but it could also be a DVD specs anomaly) but that's obviously the way it is.

/Mats

[nic2k4]

TDA lets AC3 pass through for the movie, but you can't do anything with it unless you have the AC3 plug-in. I don't know if the AC3 plug-in would allow the use of AC3 in menus. It seems to be very limited as to what can be used as a menu background, but it's easy enough to plan for it and create MPEG1's.

[SoCalMK]

Save your audio file as .wav using virtualdub. Re-encode the video clip file with the new .wav file using TMPGenc. Resulting file should work with audio.

[Joe The Dude]

The AC3 Plugin allows the use of AC3 in menus.

[jeanl]

One side note, if you open your menu VOB created by TMPGenc DVD Author in Vobedit, you will notice that the audio is converted to LPCM!
That's unless you have the ac3 plugin apparently and it's only true for menus. I find it highly annoying (i.e. you author your music background in mpeg-1 or AC3 and you end up with an LPCM audio menu, which is incredibly large). 2 really bad things about it:
- Your menus end up being much larger than needed (especially if you have a longish audio)
- TMPGenc DVD Author takes a loooooong time to create the menu vobs.

I was so annoyed by the problem that I decided to reauthor my menus (remux AC3 audio in), it's a bit involved but it's worth it. Another option would be to buy the AC3 plugin but it annoys me to have to fork $30 when besweet does such a good job of it...

jeanl
EDIT: And another thing! Even if you use a "real" still MPEG (i.e., a single I-frame with music in the background), TMPGenc DVD Author will turn that into a "fake" still menu where there's much more than 1 I-frame. Maybe because some players used to have problems with such videos. Of course, the menu ends up being larger than it should be... I've used MenuShrink to turn my TMPGenc DVD Author menus into real still menus and gain significant space on the DVD that I can use to encode with a higher bitrate. The only caveat is that you have to select the first I-frame in each cell with MenuShrink...

[dudeman316]

It has been my experience for Motion BG's with TMPGenc DVD Author that the audio of the MPEG being used for the BG needs to be MPEG or LPCM audio. I couldnt get AC3 audio to work in my menus.

[jeanl]

Well, I tried recently, and it worked, except that the AC3 audio was converted to LPCM... I don't have the AC3 plugin.
Also, dudeman316, can you check that the audio in the resulting VOB is actually MPEG? I'm willing to be that it's LPCM. It's easy to check in vobedit...
jeanl

[Joe The Dude]

As I stated earlier, i have the official AC3 Plugin for TDA.

When i use a MPEG Video File that has 2-channel AC3 Audio in a motion menu in TDA, it works.

However, I don't know weather ot not it's reencoded by TDA into LPCM.

The next time I do it, I'll run vobedit on it to check for you all.

I'd do it now, but I don't have the proper source material to do the AC3 Menu Creation at the moment.

[jeanl]

You could look at a DVD you authored that way if you still have one on your PC...
jeanl

[Joe The Dude]

Doh! I forgot about that!

I tried using vobedit to determine the audio encoding of the motion menu, but it looks like I'll be needing to spend some quality time with some faqs in order to make heads or tails of the results.

However, since I have DVD Shrink, I tried using the "Re-Author" mode on the motion menu of one of my disks.
It says "LPCM 2-ch Unspecified" on it's "Compression Settings" tab.

Unless DVD Shrink converts ripped motion menu audio onto LPCM regardless of source, I think I've discovered that TDA re-encodes all motion menu's audio to LPCM.

[jeanl]

Yes, that's exactly my experience! And no, DVD Shrink does not convert the audio.

But I'm surprised this also happens when you have the AC3 plugin (which you seem to have).
As I mentioned above, this is a very serious shortcoming of the program. Check the size of your motion menus, and you won't believe it! One that I recently created was 500MB! What a WASTE!

Now, I found a way to replace the audio in my motion menus with AC3, but it's a bit involved. The difficulty is that you want to preserve the button info (so the buttons work exactly as before), and remuxing programs usually don't let you insert that.

If there's enough interest, I'll post the program I created for that, and some detailed instructions...

jeanl

[jeanl]

Doh! I forgot about that!

I tried using vobedit to determine the audio encoding of the motion menu, but it looks like I'll be needing to spend some quality time with some faqs in order to make heads or tails of the results.

You'll want to look at an audio pack, as in here:

it will tell you if it's AC3, LPCM or MPEG-1...
DVDShrink uses the IFO to figure out what type of audio is present, which is also fine. Except if the IFO is not in sync with the VOB, but that would be very unusual...
jeanl