What to convert my audio to?

[drummerduck]

i have read in a help section on the site that it is not a good move to convert the audio to MPEG2 for quality reasons?

It said that the audio should be AC3 or PCM?

Does this sound right?

Obviously when your encoding its easy to load up your file and just convert it all together to MPEG2 (or is it MPEG3 for audio or something? excuse my lack of knowledge!!)

But is there a benefit to stripping the audio away from the video first?

[ZippyP.]

It depends what you're making. DVD uses AC3 or PCM, (S)VCD uses MP2.

TMPGEnc (if that's what you're referring to) is not a great audio encoder but it does let you use external encoders such as Lame and Toolame. Yes, many people recommend extracting a wav file and using that as the audio source for the encoder.

[David K]

I assume you're talking about making a DVD (not a VCD or SVCD, which must have mpeg audio.)

For DVD made for NTSC (US and Japan) AC3 and PCM are part of the DVD player standards. However many NTSC DVD players will play mpeg audio (mpeg audio is standard for PAL players). It is a standards issue, not a quality issue. Mpeg audio is just as good as AC3. Both are good compressed formats. But if you want maximum compatibility on NTSC players you should use AC3. PCM (actually LPCM) is an uncompressed format and takes up a lot of room on a disc and for that reason should generally be avoided in favor of the compressed formats, AC3 and mpeg audio.

Most of the high-end DVD authoring programs require that the the video and audio files be entered as separate files. But many simpler DVD authoring programs take "muxed" files (one with both video and audio). And many simple DVD authoring programs will not accept AC3 audio.