Audio Distortion with SUPER

[oller_a]

I think I may know the answer to this, but I want to bounce this off the forum and see what I get back. I've been using SUPER now for several months w/o any issues. There's been a learning curve, but once you dig into it you realize that SUPER is indeed SUPER.

Anyway, I've run into an issue with (2) separate projects where I encoded video using SUPER, and when I play the finished DVD on my player I hear what I can best describe as a chirpy distortion. The first thing I thought might be the problem was the original source file, which was an .FLV file. I had checked the file after I encoded the .MPG and everything was fine. If I open the DVD folder on my PC and play any of the chirping titles they sound fine on my PC. If I play the finished DVD on any PC it sounds fine. The only place I hear the chirping is on my DVD player. I lent a copy of both projects to a friend and they said everything sounded fine.

I thought that perhaps something didn't translate correctly, but on another project I had the same distortion from another title that was originally an .AVI file. As a shot in the dark I tried to encode the .FLV file with another encoder, WinFF. WinFF produced an unplayable .MPG (audio good, video BAD), so I took the WinFF .MPG and ran it through SUPER and came out with a good sounding (and good looking) .MPG. I recompiled the project with the new .MPG, but I still get the chirping.

One thing I remembered trying with the original .FLV file using SUPER was to encode the audio using an AC3 codec. I thought <this> may have been the cause of the chirping, so before I re-encoded the WinFF .MPG I made sure I had set the audio codec back to mp2, but that didn't fix the chirping either.

Since it appears to work fine in someone else's player and on multiple PCs I'm going to guess that my problem is my DVD player, which is a JVC that is about 8 years old. The next thing that I could try is to upgrade my DVD authoring software (I'm currently using TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6) or play around some more with the encdoers I have or different encoders, but I wanted to see what someone else thought.

Any input would be appreciated. Thank you.

[redwudz]

It seems like you have covered most of the possibilities. Realize SUPER is mostly a bunch of freeware programs cobbled together under a common GUI. Nothing spectacular there.

But it sounds like your player may be partially at fault. I would take the problem output file from SUPER and drop it into Gspot and see what the specs are, and then compare that to a file that does work. It may be SUPER is not creating a DVD compliant audio output.

DVD authoring software shouldn't make any changes in the MPEG file itself. It's job is just to rearrange the MPEG and add chapters and menus to be compliant with the DVD specification.

[hech54]

Just yesterday I used SUPER to do a quick and dirty WMV to "anything else" encode....and both attempts ended up with loud, scratchy audio. I ended up re-doing AUDIO ONLY in SUPER and added that audio to VDub instead of using the audio from the first attempt.

[oller_a]

Thank you for the prompt replies.

I used GSpot to check out the files in question. They all show as MPEG1, layer 2 (mp2). I checked out the known-good files, some of which were encoded with SUPER and they showed as either AC3 or mp2.

One of the problem source files shows as having mp4a audio (an .FLV file), and the others have mp3 audio (1 .FLV., 1 .AVI).

The source file for one of the known good files also has mp4a audio (an .MP4 file), that was the one that successfully translated to AC3 audio w/ SUPER.

Have I made this harder than it's supposed to be?

[jman98]

Super is an easy to use, one size fits all tool. Nobody claims that it's great, it's just easy to use. And exactly as redudz points out, it's simply a GUI on top of various freeware tools it uses to make conversions.

If you're going to use Super, then you accept that you get what you get out of it and you trade potential quality improvements via other methods of encoding for ease of use. If you want things to be of better quality, then bluntly put you need to use another tool.

[oller_a]

I'm not tied to SUPER, I only started using it when I came across a .FLV file that I wanted to convert. I have other tools at my disposal but this was the one I was using for .FLV files. Once I dug into it I found that it could do more so I used it more but if it can't do the job for my problem files I'm open to using another tool.

Any suggestions? I've tried WinFF alreday w/o success.

Thank you.

[jman98]

Many here like ConvertXtoDVD, but I've never used it. TMPGenc can convert a variety of formats to DVD ready files, but it's not free. ConvertXtoDVD is shareware I believe.

Converting audio is kind of tricky and most of the best tools aren't free, unfortunately.

[45tripp]

sample

[oller_a]

I'm sorry I haven't replied in a while. Again, I want to thank everyone who responded for their input.

I believe I may have found a resolution to this issue. After following redwudz's suggestion of using G-Spot to analyze my files I decided to do a little experiment. Since I know I was able to successfully encode a file with mp4 audio I thought I would try converting one of my problem files to .mp4 first, then take the .mp4 file and convert it to .MPG. I then re-compiled the DVD and I now have a great looking and sounding DVD!!

That first experiment was a .FLV file. I repeated the expiriment with an .AVI file and again I was able to eliminate the distortion.

I know I should be able to go straight from one format to the other, but I'm OK with this workaround.

Thank you all again for your input. It was much appreciated.

[redwudz]

As long as you got it to work to your satisfaction, good. You might explore some other methods when you have the spare time.