Hawkeye DVD Audio Glitches

[wellsie1978]

When I use Hawkeye to create DVDs I can play the DVDs fine on my mac and the TS files play fine when I open them in DVD Player, but when I put the DVDs in a stand alone DVD player, I get loads of audio glitches.

Can anyone help?

[Frobozz]

Have you tried a different brand of DVD media or burning the disc at a slower speed? Your description seems to indicate a problem with the disc and the standalone player.

[wellsie1978]

I haven't but I will try it. The media I have been using are RiVision 16x DVD-R. Are these renowned for being rubbish?

Thanks

[wellsie1978]

I've tried burning at a lower speed (the lowest in fact - 1x) but I still had audio glitches. Do you think it could be down to the way I'm encoding the .avi files? When I used to use ffmpegx in the video tab it would always encode at the NTSC frame rate but when I have been encoding using Hawkeye I have clicked on the .avi file in the library and click prepare for DVD and go for the PAL option? The .avis are originally from the states would this mean I have to encode using the NTSC option?

The DVDs I have been using, I haven't had a problem with them before and were fine when I used ffmpegx.

Cheers

Wellsie

[Frobozz]

What makes this confusing is that the DVDs play fine on your Mac. When a standalone DVD player has trouble reading the video it can affect how the audio plays. So this may not be an audio issue but a total bit rate issue. If in converting the AVIs you ended up with LPCM audio along with a video bit rate near 8 mbps you could have too high a combined bit rate for the player. Try a test with encoding at a lower bit rate to see if that resolves the issue.

It may work to encode as NTSC because the PAL conversion could be the issue, but I really don't know.

[wellsie1978]

How would I know if I have LPCM audio with a video bit rate of 8 mbps? All I end up with when I convert is mpeg files and TS forlders when I author.

Thanks

Wellsie

[Frobozz]

How would I know if I have LPCM audio with a video bit rate of 8 mbps? All I end up with when I convert is mpeg files and TS forlders when I author.

Thanks

Wellsie

The way I can check this is to use MPEG Streamclip. Open the first VOB in a title set in Streamclip and choose Show Stream Info. There you'll see the total bit rate and the type of audio.

If your movie is less than an hour in length and takes up most or all the space on the disc then you have a very high total bit rate. This shouldn't be an issue with movies that are longer than an hour on a single-layer disc because the bit rate has to be lowered to fit the disc.

I haven't used Hawkeye other than to take a peek at its features. So I don't know how it may be contributing to this playback problem.

[wellsie1978]

Hi thanks for that. I get 4 season episodes on one single layer disc, so I'm guessing the video bit rate is fine. I did what you suggested for one of the VOB files using Streamclip and this is what I got back:

Stream: VTS_01_1.VOB
Type: VOB program stream

Duration: 0:20:27
Data Size: 1023.97 MB
Bit Rate: 7.00 Mbps

Video Tracks:
224 MPEG-2, 720 × 564, 16:9, 29.97 fps, 3.00 Mbps, progressive

Audio Tracks:
128 AC3 3/2, 48 kHz, 384 kbps

Stream Files:
VTS_01_1.VOB (1023.97 MB)

I'm new to all this so I apologise if I sound really dumb.

Thanks for your help.

Wellsie

[Case]

Quite an odd file you have there:
VOB bitrate: 7.00 Mbps
Video bitrate: 3.00 Mbps
Audio bitrate: 384 kbps
--> 3 + 0.384 != 7 (3.6 Mbps seems missing; can't be all padding, can it?)

Video Tracks:
224 MPEG-2, 720 × 564, 16:9, 29.97 fps, 3.00 Mbps, progressive

- NTSC D1 resolution is 720x480
- PAL D1 resolution is 720x576
Your resolution is neither. The height is not even divisible by 16.

[wellsie1978]

So the VOB bitrate should be the sum of the video bitrate and the audio bitrate?

In the 'advanced' section I can change the video bitrate (default is 3000), but I'm not sure what to change it to.

I have tried encoding in both PAL & NTSC but to no avail!

It's stressing me out, I've paid $30 for hawkeye and it doesn't work properly!

Is there any other way to author multiple mpeg2 files as TS folders and burn on a DVD?

Wellsie

[Frobozz]

Have you emailed the Hawkeye developers? They seem to be putting a lot of effort into this product and I'd expect them to be helpful in resolving these issues.

Toast 7 will handle content from multiple VIDEO_TS folders and do transcoding, but you'd need to rip any commercial DVDs before using Toast.

[wellsie1978]

Yeah, but they said they don't know and just to wait for an updated version of the software to see if it does it then. Which doesn't really help.

[Case]

So the VOB bitrate should be the sum of the video bitrate and the audio bitrate?

Sum of average bitrates of video + audio + subpicture + padding streams = total average bitrate. I mention 'average' as MPEG-2 often has variable bitrate (VBR); the encoder can get a more constant quality when 'taking' bitrate from easy scenes to use in more complex scenes.
7.0 Mbps average bitrate seems about right for given runtime and file size:
0:20:27 = 1227 sec. 1024 MB = 8192 Mbit. 8192 / 1227 = 6.7

In the 'advanced' section I can change the video bitrate (default is 3000), but I'm not sure what to change it to.

I'd go with (the ffmpegX default of) 4000.

[wellsie1978]

Yeah, that runtime thing confused me a little cos they're actually about 40/45 mins long each.