Worth it to re-attach audio to this Mpeg2?

[bigass]

Here's the dealio ...

I captured a two-hour VHS tape in WinTV2k with the PVR-250 in two parts.
I joined the parts together in VideoReDo and ran the Quickstream Fix to smooth out the timecode or whatever exactly needed to be smoothed out.

I split off the audio into a wav file to make some changes. Nothing huge -- the tape was mono, and the l/r levels came out slightly different out of the VCR... there was some noise on the tape, more in the left than the right, so I doubled the right channel to both channels.

So, my plan now is to stick the audio from that wav file back onto the video, and move on to my next step -- whether that's burning to DVD, smooshing to DivX for torrenting, etc.

My query -- should I even bother with the audio shenanigans? The file was encoded mp2-style ... uncompressed to wav ... and to put it back into the mpeg2, I'll need to recompress it to mp2 or ac3, yes? Will I lose so much in one generation of uncompression/compression that I might as well just leave it as-is, or is there not much degradation from the process?

Also -- newbie question, I'm sure -- what's the simplest way to stick my audio back to my video? I'm guessing Womble wizard will do nicely?

[redwudz]

You could use ffmpeggui and convert the WAV to AC3, mostly to save space if you want to mux it back in. If you are thinking about Xvid or similar, you could use the AC3, but converting the WAV to MP3 would probably be more compatible. Yes, the audio has been worked over a few more times than optimum, but AC3 conversion shouldn't make it any worse. Or probably even MP3.

If it was noisy and the channels were uneven, does it sound better now? That's probably the only test that counts.

I don't mux MPEG audio back together that much, maybe Muxman ?

And welcome to our forums.

[bigass]

Doesn't sound miles better, as I didn't do any real cleanup of the sound ... just a small fade at the beginning and silencing of the "glzzt!" at the very end when the tape ran out. It just gives me even levels on both channels instead of a slight differential, and a slight reduction of glitches that were more on the left than the right. I figure the ac3/mp2/mp3 re-compression might go more efficiently with a mono-on-both-channels situation instead of a mostly-the-same-but-slightly-different-on-l/r scenario.

So ... okay, I won't lose much by re-crunching it. Still stands the question: advice to get this new wav back into the mpeg2 file with the video into one mpeg2? From there, I expect to use autogk to spin it off into an xvid... but re-mpeggin' it is the goal for now.