Low audio bitrate problem in H264/AVC cams like Samsung S10 & Sanyo HD2000

[hurry]

I have a Sanyo VPC-HD2000A camcorder which also records directly H264 AVC in .mp4 but I was facing a very big problem in the audio recording quality which is only a mere 128 kbps AAC even in the videos recorded at full 24 mbps 1080p or 1080i quality. The 128 kbps audio cracks and does not sound good due to such a low bitrate especially for music etc.

To solve this problem I recently purchased the Samsung HMX S10 camcorder since I wanted a camcorder which records directly in .mp4 instead of .mts with better audio quality. Today I came across a thread on this forum and downloaded a S10 video sample from here: http://time2innov8.co.uk/files/avchdtest.mp4 and to my dismay even this S10 camcorder video clip also has only 128 kbps AAC audio along with 14 MBps video. I thought Samsung did not have this low audio bitrate problem which Sanyo has. As you know 128 kbps AAC is not sufficient to record high-fidelity audio from musical instruments etc. I was planning to use an external microphone. Will this S10 record 128 kbps audio even from an external microphone?

The S10 has still not reached me and it will take a while for shipping so I wanted to kindly ask you if there is any setting or any way in either of these camcorders to increase the audio bit rate to 320 kbps or even 200 kbps otherwise it will also make S10 unusable for any decent music recordings. Is there any firmware update or anything possible to fix this problem or I will be stuck with this problem.

Your kind help or any suggestons in this regard will be most appreciated as the camcorder has still not reached me and I can still do something to return it if there is no solution for this.

Also does anyone have knowledge of other HD camcorders which record in no-avchd formats and containers like .mp4, .mov etc. with high quality audio not this meagre 128 kbps AAC audio.

Thanking you in advance for any help,

[jagabo]

I'll grant you that 128 kbps AAC isn't the ultimate in fidelity. But it's not the cause of your "audio cracks" problem. That's probably over modulation -- the sound was too loud for the camcorder.

[magillagorilla]

Are "cracks" a garble sound in the high end or are they actually clicks and pops? Garble, like how stuff sounds when you have water in your ear, is a low bit rate problem. Clicks and pops are either a short in the mic or you are brickwalling the levels. Brickwalling happens when the db level of the sound exceeds 0 on the recording device and you get noise or no sound.

It is unclear by your description which of these is your issue.

Also, mp4 and mts are just different wrappers for a similar codec. Both contain h.264 video. The wrappers behave differently in various editors and media players but the basic content is the same. The only advantage of mp4 is that is is a more universally adopted container and you may not have to transcode it for playing on the internet or media hardware.

If you are serious about the audio quality then you need to record it on a 2nd source. The Zoom h2 or H2n is a popular choice because of its quality and price point. I have one and can attest to its quality. External audio recording will give you full control over the quality of the audio.

You then have to remux the video and the new audio tracks. Since you have to remux/re-encode, your video container becomes even less relevant. In this workflow mts is fine because you can just encode it to MP4, MOV, or what ever you like and set the audio to 320kbps.

[2Bdecided]

128kbps AAC shouldn't warble.

External microphone input will use exactly the same codec+bitrate.

External recorder is your only option.

But the reason they use 128kbps AAC is because it's good enough - your problem probably lies elsewhere.

Cheers,
David.

P.S. some camcorders record 5.1 (AC3? Probably 384kbps or 448kbps). No idea how well