V-CD: Both Sound Track are played in Media player classic

[cordeliamars]

I have a great Chinese film that I would like to watch. It is on DVD, but I think it's bootleg (Although I bought it in a nice shop in Hong Kong).

Anyway, when I play this DVD from Media Player Classic (my fav player), or Real Audio, I get BOTH the Chinese Mandarin and the Chinese Cantonese Audio tracks!!

Everything is said twice in different dialects!
I can't work out how to turn it off, even after trying all the audio settings.

I started watching in VLC player (I don't like it as much as MCP, but it did NOT have the dual soundtrack. However in VLC the screen went black 20 ins into the film. This did not happen with MPC.
Real Player also had the dual track.

I just want to have one soundtrack (don't care which).
How can I make sure MPC only plays one?
The format is .dat

Hope you can help! I wanted to watch this film for ages1

Cordelia

[mats.hogberg]

To me, that sounds like a bilingual VCD (one lang in each channel). A .dat file is a piece of a VCD (the part containing audio+video).
The simple solution is to turn balance fully left ot fully right.
The hard solution is to extract (demux) the audio, convert to wav, copy the stereo channel with the audio you want to keep over the other channel, encode back to mp2 and multiplex it back with the video.

I think the procedure has been covered a few times before here at VideoHelp if you search a bit..

/Mats

[cordeliamars]

Yes, you are right. It is a bilingual VCD - I just checked the case.
I was not familiar with this format, so I just assumed it was a DVD at first. There aret wo CD discs.

How do I make MCP play one audio stream only from this V-CD?

[mats.hogberg]

Use the balance control for your audio card fully left or fully right to hear just one channel at a time. (Double click on the speaker icon in the system tray to bring up the audio settings.)

/Mats

[jman98]

First of all, since you don't know that it's a bootleg, I would advise against such speculation. Saying here that you bought a bootleg could, in theory, cause your post to get locked. There's no need to engage in such speculation as in this case, it has nothing to do with the nature of your post.

This is completely normal for VCD. VCD only supports one soundtrack, so to get two soundtracks on a VCD, they put one language in the left channel and one on the right. This happens all the time with VCDs in Hong Kong Nothing unusual or illegal about that at all.

I don't recommend the suggestion by Mats to re-author the VCD. You can try that, but I'm pretty experienced with video stuff and I can tell you that doing this is very problematic and I've had tons of problems trying to do that. I've ripped a decent amount of VCDs for various reasons and many times I've found problems with the video stream that I've had to fix in a variety of cumbersome ways. His post on using the balance control is good, or perhaps MPC has some way to adjust the balance that we don't know about.

[AlanHK]

I doubt it's a bootleg. They don't make bootleg VCDs any more, just DVDs. Legit VCDs are very cheap here -- HK$10-30 usually.

It's standard in HK to do bilingual discs that way, one in the left channel, one in the right, since the VCD format only supports one stereo soundtrack.

You should be able to play it on a DVD player. In HK at least the standard audio switch on the DVD or VCD remote that changes audio channels gives you stereo/mono left/mono right. Or if all else fails, unplug one speaker.

[AlanHK]

I don't recommend the suggestion by Mats to re-author the VCD. You can try that, but I'm pretty experienced with video stuff and I can tell you that doing this is very problematic and I've had tons of problems trying to do that.

On the other hand, I've extracted the video from VCDs and put them on DVD often and not had any serious problems. (There are so many free and good tools for DVDs, and it costs only cents more for the discs, there's hardly any reason to bother making VCDs these days.)

If you're interested:
Use VCDGear to extract MPEG1 from the disc.

I then use Womble MPEG VCR to join the parts (VCD movies are usually split over 2 or 3 discs) and demux, converting the audio sampling to 48k in the process. Then reauthor in any DVD authoring app.

You can split the soundtrack in Audacity and make two separate stereo tracks for a DVD.

The free version of SVCD2DVDMPG works quite well, if you don't need to join or edit the MPEG.

I've added subtitles too (that was the main motivation in converting some VCDs, that only had Chinese subs), though that took a bit of experimentation.

[mats.hogberg]

I don't recommend the suggestion by Mats to re-author the VCD. You can try that, but I'm pretty experienced with video stuff and I can tell you that doing this is very problematic

I said that'd be the hard way, didn't I?

/Mats

[offline]

Try VLC player.

[jman98]

I've done exactly what AlanHK recommends and I've had tons of problems. We probably don't have the same VCDs, but the ones I buy inevitably seem to have all kinds of issues with the video that I have to fix. It could also partly be my authoring tool. Scenarist is the only thing I have that will let me make DVDs out of MPEG-1 video and it is incredibly fussy about what it will accept in MPEG-1.

[AlanHK]

Scenarist is the only thing I have that will let me make DVDs out of MPEG-1 video and it is incredibly fussy about what it will accept in MPEG-1.

Quite likely.
Note that SVCD2DVDMPG does patch the header of the MPEG1 to make it less objectionable to such fussy authoring tools. Maybe you could try that. But I use GuiForDVDAuthor, which doesn't complain (much) about what I give it. MPEG1, MPEG2; NTSC, PAL, all work; even on the same disc though that's not strictly kosher.

Oddest problem I had was with an NTSC VCD -- which gave me a 23.976 fps MPEG1, valid for VCD, but problematic, I thought, for DVD. There is no pulldown for MPEG1. So I thought I was stuck with transcoding it to get 29.997 fps. But I thought I'd just throw it in to GfD and see what happened first, and I got a DVD that played, in sync, without a hitch, though the elapsed time indicator and chapter points were out of whack.