Thanks to all of you with the help on my DIVX avi project. I've been fighting with this AVI for a while now. The avi was encoded with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. The DIVX was high quality. Good enough that I wanted to move it to DVD-R, while retaining the 5.1 surround sound. I also needed to do this for a very low price (free is a good starting place).

I successfully joined all of the pieces, extracted the 5.1 surround sound AC3, encoded the video to MPEG-2, corrected the errors in the AC3 using AC3Fix, and used PullDown.exe to 'fix' the frame rate, so the M2V could be imported into SpruceUp

The AC3Fix, and the PullDown.exe were the last pieces of the puzzle. These gave me too much grief, and not being familiar with all of the software, more headache than I care to share.

For any newbies interested, I used the following steps. These are not necessarily the fastest method, and I'm sure there are far better, but they worked for me and they weren't too complicated.

Tools Required:

Virtual Dub
AC3Fix
PullDown.exe
CCE (or TMPGenc)
SpruceUp
Nero (or any authoring software that can burn from a VIDEO_TS folder)

Step 1: Join Multi-Parts (Time to complete: 2 minutes give or take)
Easy step. Use Virtual Dub to open the first avi in your sequence. Set the Audio to Direct Stream Copy. Set the Video to 'Direct Stream Copy'. From the file menu select 'Append AVI Segment'. Repeat for each avi part. Last but not least, select FILE | SAVE AVI. The resulting file should put all of your pieces together.
NOTE: You should save the multiparts to another physical drive is possible. It will reduce the time to complete by about 400%. A seperate partition on the same drive will not affect performance in any beneficial way.

Step 2: Extract AC3 Audio (Time to complete: about 1 minute)
Easy step. Open your new complete AVI, and select FILE | SAVE AS WAV. Once the file is saved, rename the .WAV extension to .AC3
NOTE: You should save the wav to another physical drive is possible. It will reduce the time to complete by about 400%. A seperate partition on the same physical drive will not affect performance in any beneficial way.

Step 3: Resize (Time to complete: about 2-4 hours)
I have no idea how to frameseve to CCE, so this part is broken out as a seperate step.
For some reason, all of the DIVX, or XVID files I download are never in the original DVD resolution, even when ripped directly from DVD (maybe someone could tell me why? Space reasons?). These source files typically have the letterboxing removed to save additional space. I wasn't aware of this until recently, but apparently most movies come with letterboxing, even on the widescreen versions, albeit a very minimal amount.

I used virtual dub to resize the avi to DVD NTSC standard of 720x480.

The source file was 640x272, which I resized to 720x352 using the built in VDub "Resize" filter. This gives me the correct aspect ratio (or close enough to it). The same resize filter also allows you to add letterboxing using the "Expand Frame and Letterbox Image" option. I set the full size here to 720x480 to get the full 16:9 widescreen.

Step 4: Encode (Time to complete: Varies - depends on your settings/encoder)
I used CCE for this, using 3 pass VBR. I won't go into the process here, as I'm sure you all know how to encode a file using your preferred software. I should note however that the encode is done without audio in all situations.

Step 5: Pulldown (Time to complete: About 5 minutes)
Use the PULLDOWN.EXE to perform a 3:2 pulldown if necessary. Most of these DIVX files are encoded using FILM framerates (23.976 fps). If your DIVX file is not using FILM for a frame rate, skip this step. If it is, and you skip this step, SruceUp will give you an "Invalid Framerate" error when you try to import. You can also correct the Aspect Ratio of your movie here if it's incorrect. Many people seem to have this problem when using TMPGenc. You can fix your fudged settings here. This will fix many "Wide Screen not displaying correctly" type problems.

Step 6: Correct your AC3 file (Time to complete: About 5 minutes)
This one threw me for a long trip. The file would fail on import into SpruceUp with the error "Unsupported File Format", even though everyone says it fully supports 5.1 AC3. I didn't find the fix until yesterday. Apparently when VDub is used to extract the AC3, it tends to corrupt the file for some reason. If you skip this step, then importing your MPEG, and AC3 into SpruceUp will get you an import error. The command is a simple DOS based command line:
AC3FIX.EXE {sourcefilename} {targetfilename}. Once the utility is done, make sure your AC3, and M2V have the exact same filename, except for the extension (example: Movie.m2v Movie.ac3 )

Step 7: DVD Image using SpruceUp (Time to complete: About 30 minutes)
The actual time you spend here could be substantial, or just the time it takes to set the first play, and make an image. I never burn the DVD via SpruceUp. This allows me to keep the image file handy on the hard drive. I always use a DVD-RW for the first run, so I don't make any coasters. Your call. SpruceUp is no longer for sale, but demo copies can be had in the tools section. Do with your demo, what you will to make things work for you...

When you import the M2V into SpruceUp, assuming your M2V, and AC3 have the same filename, then both will be automatically imported. If you've done everything correctly, and the heavens are smiling on you, your import should comlete, and your video tile on the import screen should show both a film strip to indicate video, and a speaker to indicate audio. Preview your DVD to make sure the sound is working. If your all set, either burn your DVD using SpruceUp, or make an image for later burning with the authoring software of your choice.

8) Cheers 8)

DJRumpy