NeroVisio Express - SOLUTION to "no audio" problem

[larry__ellison]

Ahead has perpetrated faulty software on the public. Their product, Nero Vision Express, writes out the IFO files (the ones that tell your player what's on your DVD and where) incorrectly. The IFO's tell your DVD player that your video uses MPEG audio when it's really LPCM.

Before I get to the workaround, please permit allow me a small advertisement: If you have a choice, I'd STRONGLY recommend Ulead DVD MovieFactory 2 (only $49 from their website). It does "real" manual chapter points like NVE, but it has two distinct advantages:

1) It does not force you to re-encode EVERY FILE you give it. NVE forces you to re-encode every video file that you want to put on your disk, even if they are already 100% DVD standards compliant. This takes a huge amount of time, not to mention the fact that it's another "generation" for your file, reducing quality.

2) Ulead allows you to use (or will encode for you) files with MPEG audio. NVE forces you to use LPCM (uncompressed, WAV format) audio which takes up a HUGE amount of space on the finished disk. This equates to much less video capacity on your finished DVD.

However, if you've already purchased the MPEG 2 encoder for NVE, here's how to work around the problem.

1) You need IFOEdit (http://www.ifoedit.com).

2) Author your disk in NVE and choose to write the DVD to a folder on your hard drive (don't burn to a DVD yet).

3) Use IFOEdit to open up the file named VTS_01_0.IFO. You'll find this file in the folder to which you authored your DVD.

4) Under "Title Set (Movie) attributes," Double-click on the entry marked "Audio 1." In the popup window, change the "Coding Mode" entry to "Linear PCM" (you'll notice that it was listed as MPEG before!) and click "OK".

5) Click "Save." Leave the filename as-is. Answer "Yes" to the question about "... save as BUP as well...".

6) Burn your DVD using your favorite DVD burning software. Nero works for me, but see other posts in this forum regarding UDF/ISO mode stuff when burnind video DVD's with Nero (Ahead Software strikes again!)

If the disk you've authored has more than one VOB file on it, you'll probably have to repeat this process for the other IFO files in your DVD directory. This is where my knowledge is a bit short.

[David K]

Great fix. But there is an additional complication that users need to keep in mind. One has to first check which video files that Nerovision has converted to LPCM. For reasons that are not yet clear, Nerovision sometimes retains the original mpeg audio of a mpeg file and sometimes converts it to LPCM (See my postings in previous topic “Nerovision No Audio Problem”). For those files that Nerovision retains in mpeg audio no editing of their respective IFOs are necessary and indeed would create the problem in reverse.

In WinDVD 4 one can play individual VOB files and then go to Setup-properties to see its audio format. Other software DVD players may have similar functions.

Lacking any other way, one should burn a demo to a re-writable disc and then see which files have sound or not, and then go back to do the editing.