mp2 ac3 or wav for my movie?

[kingoflubrication]

hi, havent posted in a long time, and need a little help.....
just wondering what audio codec i should use for a movie that some friends and i shot on dv about a year ago. of course i want to put it on a dvd. i would like i to be the most compatible, but also not use a lot of space.

i know that mp2 uses the least amount of disc space, but how compatible is it w/dvd players? i know one of my dvd author progs wont let me input this format.
i would like to try to not use wav format since it creates the largest files.
that leaves ac3. what programs can i use to encode my audio to ac3? i think i have seen people talk about a free program called besweet(sp), but not everyone seems happy with it. any programs that arent that expensive i can use for ac3?

i would like to use mp2 because i'm not that concerned w/quality, but will it play in lots of dvd players? so ac3 or mp2? thanks.

[gadgetguy]

You can also encode audio to AC3 using the free video encoder QuEnc.
All players should be able to play mp2 because it is supported as a secondary audio, however if a player is really anal, it won't recognise it unless the primary audio is ac3 or PCM (wav). I have never encountered such a player, but I only have experience with the 3 players that I own.

[kingoflubrication]

another quick question. if i use wav (pcm) or ac3 will tmpgenc let me open these formats to combine (mux, i guess) with my .m2v (sorry i think thats the right extension tmpenc makes for the video only stream). which version of tmpgenc do i need, because i dont think my version will let me.

sorry i'm using simple off the shelf oem authoring progs for right now, and these wont let me add the audio/video streams one at a time. thanks

[redwudz]

For DV, I use ffmpeggui to convert the WAV to 2 channel AC3 after I finish editing. Then I encode only the video with TMPGEnc and when converted to DVD compliant MPEG-2, I put this into TMPGEnc DVD Author, along with the AC3 audio and author.

TMPGEnc encoder would need to have a AC3 plugin to use that format. ffmpeggui works a lot easier for me. TMPGEnc encoder doesn't do audio that well, anyway, IMO. I would avoid muxing anyway, just let the authoring program handle that.