Does weakest link hold for AVI to DVD conversion?

[digicube]

I have an Divx/Xvid AVI file that I want to convert to DVD. The AVI has 128kbps MP3 audio. Will it improve audio quality if I convert it to 192kbps MP2 audio? I'm using Besweet which has a preset for DVD audio at 192kbps but the weakest link come to mind. If it won't improve audio quality, I might as well convert it to 128kbps MP2 audio so more space can be used for video.

[jimmalenko]

The AVI has 128kbps MP3 audio. Will it improve audio quality if I convert it to 192kbps MP2 audio?

No. You can't improve anything (video or audio) unless you apply some sort of filtering on it, which might improve it slightly, but simply upping the bitrate won't on its own.

[FulciLives]

If you use MP2 audio on your DVD do at least 224kbps ... if I were to use MP2 audio I would use 384kbps

However AC-3 is better and 256kbps for AC-3 is more than enough (at least for a standard 2 channel stereo source).

Plus AC-3 tends to work better on DVD players that MP2 audio.

BeSweet can do AC-3 encoding as can ffmpeg.

I suggest you convert the MP3 first to a 48k 16-bit Stereo PCM WAV file. Then convert that PCM WAV file to AC-3 or MP2. This seems to work better than trying to go straight from MP3 to AC-3/MP2.

Also in case you didn't know ... MP3 audio cannot be used on a DVD Video.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
After converting the MP3 to PCM WAV you might want to "work" with the PCM WAV file before converting to AC-3 or MP2. For instance you can use a good audio editing program (such as GoldWave) to "clean" up the audio by removing hiss (if present) and oftentimes normalizing the audio is a good idea too.

[digicube]

My audio source is 128kbps MP3, will the method FulciLives suggested actually be better than converting to 128kbps MP2 audio instead?

[FulciLives]

My audio source is 128kbps MP3, will the method FulciLives suggested actually be better than converting to 128kbps MP2 audio instead?

MP3 is better at lower bitrates than MP2 so to "keep" the same level of quality you need to use a higher MP2 bitrate than the MP3 bitrate. You loose a tiny bit of quality in the conversion anyways but still.

224kbps is considered the lowest setting that MP2 audio should use to sound decent. 384kbps is the highest setting that MP2 audio can use.

I highly suggest you consider using AC-3 audio instead of MP2.

Also don't forget to convert to a PCM WAV file first (from the MP3) before converting to AC-3 (or MP2 if you must).

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[mats.hogberg]

My audio source is 128kbps MP3, will the method FulciLives suggested actually be better than converting to 128kbps MP2 audio instead?

Yes.
There is no way to find correspondance between bitrates of different compresion methods - when converting to another compressed format, you'll always lose some quality. By using the most efficient method available (AC3 in the DVD case) and as high bitrate as possible, yor loss will be the least. But somewhere there's a max bitrate above which loss minimizing becomes absurd (you'll only get a bigger file, with hardly any noticable (if any) improvement in quality), so FulciLives suggestion is sound.

/Mats