N0Ob - AV out of sync when i burn AVI's to DVD

[chisoxfan84]

I have a whole season of a particular TV show on my HDD. There are 24 files in all (All of them Xvid AVIs with mpeg-layer 3 audio) totaling 4.3 GB in all. The dimensions aren't uniform but are all close to 624x352. The audio levels are all diferent too. What I'd really like to do is burn them to DVD media so I can watch them from the couch.

I've burned a DVD in Nero Vision and another in DVDit Pro, but results were not what i was expecting. The image quality was a little weak but most annoying, was the way that the Audio and Video would slowly drift apart. By the end of a 30 min episode, the A-V lag was about a whole second!

Is it my transcode settings? I didn't personally capture the files, but they all play in sync in WMP. What is going on here?

PS - If anybody has a difinitive answer to Normalizing the Audio from multiple AVI files to a single level, please share info or link. Thanks alot in advance.

[redwudz]

Download Gspot 2.60 and drop one of the problem files in there. You are looking to see if the green VBR audio indicator lights up. If so, that may be your sync problem. If not, you can at least see more info about the videos.

The method I use is to open the video with VirtualDub Mod, set audio to full processing and save out the audio as a WAV file. Then, since you want to work with the audio, download the freeware audio editor Audacity and Import the WAV. You can Normalize the audio or make other adjustments or filtering. Then output as a WAV.

From there, you have several options. The easiest is to use a program like ConvertXToDVD. You will need to Add the WAV audio back into VD Mod. Then select Direct stream copy for the video. That will give you a new file with the old video and the new audio. Drop it into ConvertX and convert to DVD.

Alternately, you can use your existing programs with the new file that VD Mod has created and encode with them.

If no VBR, then you might want to post a screenshot of the Gspot page from the video. Blank out the video name.

Guide for saving out a WAV: http://members.dodo.net.au/~jimmalenko/ExtractAudio.htm

Guide for posting screenshots: https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=271697

And welcome to our forums.

[chisoxfan84]

Ran GSpot, neccessary Codecs were found, and the GREEN VBR indicator is positive. (I could only find one VBR indicator in the GSpot window... in the audio panel.) I'm familiar with Audacity and will now switch from VirtualDub to VDubMod. (I haven't been able to figure out batch/automate function)

Thanks for the promptness and the help.

[chisoxfan84]

Okay, hit a snag. VDub & VDubMod return very similar errors when trying to open these particular files. Screenshots from Gspot and VDubMod below:

[redwudz]

That's not a problem. That's just your confirmation that you have VBR audio. Just click 'No' and go ahead and save it out as a WAV. The last part of that warning is what you will be doing by saving out as a WAV. You can put it back in and re-encode it to MP3 CBR also, but if you plan on encoding to MPEG, not really worth the extra work.

Most MPEG encoders will choke on MP3 VBR audio. They can't read the length properly, I suspect, and they mess up the encode. If you are getting Xvids or Divx files off the net, you will run into this problem fairly often.

It's not the only cause of bad sync when encoding, but by far the most common. Other causes are bad joining of video files from parts, or corrupted video/audio. BTW, WAV files are big. You may want to delete the WAVs after a successful encode.

[chisoxfan84]

I went and executed a batch process for wav extraction from the AVIs in VDubMod. (So happy to be able to automate) One problem came up; of the 24 files, only 17 of them extracted properly. Here's the error code VDubMod spit out:



Those same "problem-videos" won't play back any sound in Vdub but play just fine with AV sync'd in WMP10. Each preceding screenshot relates to one specific file.


I think I'm going to put this whole thing to rest actually. I was thinking about picking up a DivX ready set top player for Xmas. If I can just burn the DivX files directly to a data DVD and play on set top, I'll never author another DVD again. And for ~$50? yes.

Thanks alot though. For n00bs like me, these forums are the best help around.