No Audio Found problem in mainconcept

[freemink]

Hi.

I downloaded an Xvid movie which also came with a 1 minute sample file. Excellent quality. Now I want to convert the movie to DVD (for a friend).

I ran a test on the small sample file and I found I could serve with avisynth, open in virtualdub, and also open in MainConcept mpeg encoder and convert fine.

When I do the same thing on the full-sixe file I get no sound in MainConcept (no audio found) - although I do get sound when I serve to VirtualDub.

The sample file has:
Audio: 0x2000(AC3, Dolby Laboratories, Inc) AC3
48000Hz 384 kb/s total (5 chnls)

The full-size has:
Audio: 0x0055(MP3, ISO) MPEG-1 Layer 3
44100Hz 32 kb/s total (2 chnls)

I have tried to seperate the audio stream etc, but I end up with all sorts of synching problems.

So,

1. Why am I having a problem with "(MP3, ISO) MPEG-1 Layer 3" audio in MainConcept?
2. Why is the audio okay in VirtualDub?
3. Is there a way I can get the audio stream to be recognized in MainConcept encoder?

4. Or, how can I convert the audio in the xvid to something compatible with MainConcept?

I'd really like to stay with this AviSynth/MainConcept method if possible.

thanks,
Darrell

[reboot]

Open in virtualdub. Click Audio, Full Stream processing.
Click File, save .wav
Open Mainconcept, encode only the video.
Depending on your authoring application, you can mux the two in tmpgenc, convert to LPCM 16 bit .wav in something like Goldwave or Audacity, or transcode the .wav to AC3 in ffmpeggui and import that into your authoring app.
The problem is the mp3 audio, it's probably VBR, and there's not an encoder around that seems to deal with that very well.

[freemink]

Thanks for the reply. I'll give it a go.

The problem is I always seem to end up with audio synch problems when i seperate the audio and video like this. While I keep everything in AVISynth/Mainconcept I can control it better.

But I'll try...
Cheers.

[reboot]

But if your audio is mp3 vbr, then even Mainconcept can throw it out of sync.
I get this constantly on downloaded avi's.
Never had a problem ripping and transcoding to AC3 48khz, then authoring in dvdlab.
I had all sorts of problems with Mainconcept, tmpgenc, CCE, etc, as they all deal with audio slightly differently, and basically are video encoders, not audio encoders.
The sample is already AC3 wrapped in .wav so the encoding works perfectly.

[freemink]

I followed your suggestion and it worked well. I seperated the audio stream with virtualdub, transcoded to ac3, encoded just the video with mainconcept, then authored in dvd-lab. Worked great. No synching problems at all.

Now I just have to DVD-Shrink the project and hope the quality will be good enough, or it'll be a two dvd job.

Thanks again for the advice.