GUI For DVDAuthor (GFD) won't let me add audio

[rail]

edit: PROBLEMS SOLVED (multiple). See posts below if you're interested.

I've been struggling for days to author 1 DVD. Depending on the combination of tools I use I either get no sound, or burn failures, or a DVD that media player claims it can't play (even though it's clearly playing behind the dialog that says it can't). Strangely enough, my home-theater deck (over 10 years old) has slightly less problems with the few successful burns than MediaPlayer does.

I have a test project in Vegas, containing about 30 seconds of video and sound. I render it to separate files:
test DVD.MPG - Audio: None; Video: NTSC DV, 29.97 fps, 720x480.
test DVD.aif - Audio: 44,100 Hz, 16 Bit, Stereo, PCM AIFF.

DVDArchitect simply won't render a DVD with sound. It looks right, it "previews" right, but the end result is a DVD that has no sound. I won't even go into the nightmare I endured getting reliably playable burns.

So now I'm trying out GFD, and at step 2 it won't even permit me to supply an audio file. It gripes if I have audio in the MPG, so I leave it out, but the "Video + Audio Files" window (properties of video source) has disabled the the open-file buttons in the "Audiofiles(s)" section. How the heck do I add audio? FYI, I have GFD in NTSC mode.

[dadrab]

I'm not the end-all in creating a good disc, but I am pretty familiar with GuiforDVDAuthor.

If you want to make a fully compliant DVD, you're going to need to convert your audio to AC3 format. There are many free apps out there that'll do it. I use ffmpegGUI. It does a good job and the price is right.

One tip I picked up from the fine folks here that has really helped me is to keep all the pieces of a DVD project in a single folder. Everything from the AVISynth script to the AC3 audio conversion is located in the same place on the desk top. By using this method, when you browse to the folder with your MPG file, the audio will be right there and might even default into GDA. If not, it's a quick button click to put it there.

[redwudz]

The DVD specification doesn't permit 'Audio: 44,100 Hz'. It has to be 48,000 Hz or it won't work. That may be one problem.

DVD format
720 x 480 pixels MPEG2
352 x 480 pixels MPEG2
352 x 240 pixels MPEG1
48000 Hz 32 - 1536 kbps DD (Dolby Digital/AC3), DTS, PCM(uncompressed audio), MPEG-1 Layer2

[dadrab]

The DVD specification doesn't permit 'Audio: 44,100 Hz'. It has to be 48,000 Hz or it won't work. That may be one problem.

Yep. That's very true too - and I should have caught it.

[rail]

Bummer I'm not at home where I can try a few things, but here's an update, based on questions I've read:

I tried using *.AC3 audio files first, and more thoroughly. I had zero luck with it, which is the reason I started playing with *.AIF (it seemed simpler). With *.AC3 I do not recall having any choices for sampling rate/etc, but there may have been. I've tried so many permutations of tools and techniques that it's all scrambled in my head now. My bad for not catching the 44k audio sample rate.

In any case, none of that explains why the GFD interface has disabled a button that every walk-through and help-file tells me to push.

[borax]

If your video file is named mpg (or vob), GfD assumes that it is a multiplexed system stream already. Rename it to m2v (or mpv) and you can add your audio file(s)

[theewizard]

If your video file is named mpg (or vob), GfD assumes that it is a multiplexed system stream already. Rename it to m2v (or mpv) and you can add your audio file(s)

nobody told me that, when i was working on my first couple of projects with GFD and having trouble, with audio

they just said it only accepts elementry streams, an i reprocessed everything, nobody suggested changing the file ext and then GFD would accept the audio stream

[rail]

PROBLEM SOLVED......or at least mostly. Thanks to everyone for the do's and don'ts. I knew many of them, but having it in my face helped.

After correcting and quadruple-checking my settings, and using "NTSC DVD video stream" (m2v) as suggested here, I was able to get GFD to work, but alas, I still had no sound during playback. Partly due to affirmations above, I was confident in my configuration, so I began to look elsewhere for trouble. I burned up a +R disk (instead of +RW) to test a theory. It played in my home theater deck with sound! YAY! The +RW disks had played sometimes, but not always, and each partial-success or failure [miss]lead me to believe that my last action was better or worse than what I had before. BUT, it gets even better! When I knew I had a good disk in my hand, I put it back into my DVD drive/burner and played it. No sound! So I tried a production DVD. No sound! This is starting to smell fishy. I began to suspect my hardward. I'll spare you the rest of the tale. It turns out that Micro$haft MediaPlayer (probably due to some recent "better get this" patch) is no longer playing the audio from ANY DVD. So, 95% of my trial and error testing was invalid, and the other 5% (on the home theater deck) happened to have bad sound tracks, bad burns, or touchy media.

I fired up Nero ShowTime and all of today's burns played just fine (even the ones that won't play in the home theater deck).

[borax]

nobody told me that, when i was working on my first couple of projects with GFD and having trouble, with audio

they just said it only accepts elementry streams, an i reprocessed everything, nobody suggested changing the file ext and then GFD would accept the audio stream

I don't know who told you about it, but actually it is (IMHO quite clearly) written in the docu:
http://download.videohelp.com/gfd/Help/VideoFileDialog.html
...
1. Videofile
Some characteristics (size, aspect...) of the video are shown here. In addition it is checked if a ready muxed mpg stream contains 'Navigation Packs' (Mux OK=Yes). Without the navigation packs dvdauthor can't handle the file. Elementary streams are muxed with the necessary navigation packs (by mplex with - f 8 option).
Elementary video files are accepted in the formats: mpv, m1v and m2v.
Ready muxed mpg streams are accepted only if they are named mpg or vob.
...
But maybe I should also include it in the FAQ

[AlanHK]

I tried using *.AC3 audio files first, and more thoroughly. I had zero luck with it, which is the reason I started playing with *.AIF (it seemed simpler). With *.AC3 I do not recall having any choices for sampling rate/etc, but there may have been. I've tried so many permutations of tools and techniques that it's all scrambled in my head now. My bad for not catching the 44k audio sample rate.

Have you converted the audio to AC3, 48000 Hz sample rate?

ffmpegGUI can make good AC3 from most formats (though not apparently AIFF).
BeSweet also is worth a try.