Very stupid question

[pbuscher]

Ok, I'm sorry if this has been answered, but I couldnt find it anywhere.
I've check the articles but didnt find anything either.

It deals with video but mostly audio.

I have an AVI (using a XviD codec) that I want to make into a DVD. The audio uses AC3 with 5.1 channels. Do I need to somehow convert the AVI into a audio file (WAV?) so that when I encode it to a MPEG it would contain the 5.1 surround sound? Because when I load the AVI file in TMPGEnc Xpress, it says that the audio is 2ch, but in my Media Info program, it says that its AC3 with 5.1 channels. I'd hate to loose the 5.1 channels when encoding it to put on a DVD. Do I need another program for this?

Any help would be great. Thanks!
Sorry again if this has already been answer or that I'm just plain dumb.

[ozymango]

Not a stupid question at all!

I haven't actually done this myself so I'll instantly defer to anybody who can be of more help, but my understanding is that you'll need to de-mux the original .avi file and do some tweaking when you recombine things in order to keep the 5.1 track intact. AC3 2-channel and 5.1 are horses of different colors and so it's not quite drag and drop time.

Again, I ain't actually done this but I do have a link that shows one way of doing this --

http://www.mccrae.biz/andrew/avi%20to%20dvd/avi2dvd.htm

It does. however, require a couple of pieces of not free software, at least in this version; also it is a bit involved so unless my source file was one-of-a-kind I'd probably just see if I could find the original video in some other form.

Hopefully somebody else can give ya more info on this. Good luck!

[BJ_M]

just demux the ac3 with virtualdub and use ac3fix on the resulting file (most likely) ..

use this ac3 file in your authoring app - along with the mpeg file you encoded from your xvid avi ..

thats it

[pbuscher]

Thanks guys! I'll give that a try.