DVDAuthorgui wave audio support?

[video_magic]

I've used the program occasionally over the last few years and have become quite comfortable using it, it is well designed and has the features I like to use to make simple DVDs (menu and some chapters). I will be backing up all my old music video tapes soon, and one thing I would like is wave audio support! It is something of a preservation task for me - I would rather not convert to lossy (ac3 or mp2), is that a feature that would be likely to be added? Thanks in advance for considering the request.

[El Heggunte]

Hi there.

Both mplex and dvdauthor do support "DVD-V compliant" uncompressed audio.
So, probably, you'll have to do without the GUIs and deal with the CLI applications directly...

[liquid217]

Mplex supports lpcm audio, which is a little different than a straight WAV file. If I remember correctly, the byte order would have to be reversed in order to convert a WAV to LPCM format. Anyway, if you can multiplex the audio yourself, you can use the muxed VOB with DVDAuthorGUI. One multiplexer in mind that could that would be ImagoMPEG (https://www.videohelp.com/tools/ImagoMPEG-Muxer)

[El Heggunte]

One multiplexer in mind that could that would be ImagoMPEG (https://www.videohelp.com/tools/ImagoMPEG-Muxer)

ImagoMPEG-Muxer supports only MP2 and AC3, apparently.

[video_magic]

Thanks, I've previously created single-title dvds, no menu, with a wav file for audio using the basic version of Muxman. I'll look into it and thanks again: http://www.mpucoder.com/Muxman/versions.shtml When I import my VOBs into DVDAuthorgui I'm just wondering how it will handle joining all the VOBs into the final folder structure output, I mean if it doesn't understand wav audio, should it be quite reliable? I've always been pretty happy with any DVDs so far using ac3 - only asking because these will be my back-ups. Which of the choices in your program under Tools would you recommend?

[liquid217]

Sorry about the tip with Imago. I was thinking it could handle LPCM.
I don't know if muxman has a switch to force it to multiplex only, but if it did, that would be ideal. You would want it as one large contiguous file if you import it into DVDAuthorGUI.
I have been finding that ffmpeg is much more flexible than mplex for multiplexing. If I can find the right command line options to include, I may be able to add lpcm support in DVDAuthorGUI, but only when ffmpeg is selected.

For my ears, I have never been able to discern any difference between a good bitrate AC3 vs uncompressed, but that's just me.

[video_magic]

[QUOTE=liquid217;1999172]...
I have been finding that ffmpeg is much more flexible than mplex for multiplexing. If I can find the right command line options to include, I may be able to add lpcm support in DVDAuthorGUI,..../QUOTE]

Thanks so much for looking into adding my feature request!

I think if it turns out that ffmpeg is better at authoring, than the older Mplex, and that it supports all 3 audio standards for DVD:- AC3, WAV & MP2, maybe it could even be set as default in your program and all 3 audio formats appear as supported by default?

I know what you mean about AC3 @ 320 is indistinguishable from WAV, and have to agree with you that personally for listening to music on my computer I encode to lossy most of the time (normally VBR MP3 around 150) from WAV recordings or rips. For that purpose it is fine.

However, as my DVD encodes from VHS tapes is more of a preservation archiving project (as my tapes deteriorate and get white powder on them) that is why I am happy to chuck another 1.2mb/s bitrate at them and have the audio as WAV, all my music-videos are under 2 hours & 10 minutes and this would give me a lowest average Video bitrate of about 3100kb/s for my longest tape, most of the other tapes would be encoded around 4600kb/s. Those bitrates with decent settings are enough to give me very good quality for MPEG-2. In the future I can always rip out the M2V & WAV if I want to put them in another container for another playback device and temporarily encode from the WAV to different audio if needed for that device.

Looking forward very much to a new version if and when, and thanks for the multiplexing tip which I will be checking for in any CLI options.

[liquid217]

I haven't been able to figure out how to multiplex a straight wav file into the vob container with ffmpeg yet. Here are the arguments I am using currently:

ffmpeg.exe -fflags genpts  -i testfile.m2v  -i testfile.wav -vcodec copy -acodec copy -target ntsc-dvd output.mpg

This will complain about buffer underruns, and then produce a file that when played, has no audio (at least, that's what it does in VLC).
If I remove the '-acodec copy' argument, ffmpeg will reencode the source to AC3.
If anyone has any suggestions on getting ffmpeg to cooperate, please let me know.

[video_magic]

I've just finished another session of a few hours trying the same thing with ffmpeg (r23926 1st July) - I have tried every trick I could read up about, my results are about the same as yours.

For now I have given up, I don't think I have any new ideas to put and m2v and LPCM outputted into a workable MPG nor VOB

I came across this thread from sometime back:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=99042&highlight=lpcm

Thanks for trying anyway! I appreciate that very much.

[video_magic]

p.s. sorry forgot to type in that for acodec you can have choices (it is hard to find on the web exactly what the spec for LPCM for DVD should be!) example:

-acodec pcm_s16be

-acodec pcm_s16le

just type ffmpeg -codecs and a list scrolls down

[liquid217]

Ahh, yes. In ffmpeg -codecs, you see that pcm_dvd supports decoding, but not encoding, so it looks like ffmpeg may not work for lpcm. At least, not right now anyway. Muxman can still do what you need though. You can either use muxman by itself, or you can feed the generated vobs into DVDAuthorGUI. There's a tool called VOB2MPG which can easily concatenate several vob files, if the vobs are larger than 1 gig (after muxman authors them).

I will keep investigating this...

[video_magic]

Thankyou!; I hope to get a bit more time this weekend to try.
I also looked at Mplayer & Mencoder which is supposed to be a similar project to FFMpeg, the Manpages take some hours to browse through, still couldn't get a correct result.

Once again, thanks a lot for your efforts.

[autodidact]

I'm pretty sure signed big-endian is correct for DVD lpcm so the pcm_s16be codec is okay but it seems that ffmpeg can't multiplex it properly. I've had success using the opensource Sox program to convert the wave file to a raw big endian file and then using mplex to multiplex the audio and video.

sox.exe test.wav -B -c 2 -r 48000 test.raw

I changed the extension to lpcm and used the -L 48000:2:16 option in mplex.

[El Heggunte]

I changed the extension to .LPCM and used the -L 48000:2:16 option in mplex.

Thanks for the information.

I didn't know "mplex" was soooooooo ztoopid.

[liquid217]

Ok, thanks to autodidact, I put together a small frontend to drive sox and mplex, found here:
http://download.videohelp.com/liquid217/download.pl?d=DVDMux-0.1.zip

Right now, it can only multiplex one video stream, and one audio stream. You can select either mp2, ac3, or wav now, thanks to Sox. It creates an intermittent LPCM file in the same directory as the source wav file, so you may want to delete it once it finishes.

I thought about adding this to DVDAuthorGUI, but 2 things are stopping me. #1, Sox is quite large (2.3 Meg), so it would make the DVDAuthorGUI installer much larger. (I'm trying to keep it under 5 meg). #2, I really want to move toward ffmpeg, and away from mplex, and (as mentioned earlier), ffmpeg doesn't support muxing lpcm as of yet.

Anyway, hope you can get some use out of it.

[liquid217]

Yes, I realize the irony in my statements above. I'm planning though, in DVDAuthorGUI, to not actually package ffmpeg. When the user first starts DVDAuthorGUI, it will ask them if they would like to download ffmpeg. If they answer yes, then the GUI will download and extract ffmpeg itself, and then sets it as the default engine. If the user answers no, then it defaults to mplex, just as normal.

[El Heggunte]

liquid217 wrote:

Ok, thanks to autodidact, I put together a small frontend to drive sox and mplex, found here:
http://download.videohelp.com/liquid...DVDMux-0.1.zip

Right now, it can only multiplex one video stream, and one audio stream. You can select either mp2, ac3,

What about DTS ???

or wav now, thanks to Sox. It creates an intermittent LPCM file in the same directory as the source wav file, so you may want to delete it once it finishes.

I thought about adding this to DVDAuthorGUI, but 2 things are stopping me. #1, Sox is quite large (2.3 Meg), so it would make the DVDAuthorGUI installer much larger. (I'm trying to keep it under 5 meg). #2, I really want to move toward ffmpeg, and away from mplex, and (as mentioned earlier), ffmpeg doesn't support muxing lpcm as of yet.

riffstrip.exe = 14336 bytes

swab.exe = 75264 bytes

Lightware is good, bloatware is evil.

[liquid217]

This thread was primarily about WAV/LPCM support, not DTS. Does mplex or ffmpeg support multiplexing DTS? ffmpeg -codecs doesn't seem to show anything, although it may be called something else.

And those other tools you mentioned, that is the first I have heard of them. Are they GPL/LGPL? It would be nice, if they supported stdout, so I wouldn't have to create several intermittent files.

It's funny. Googling them brings up this thread as the first results.

[El Heggunte]

This thread was primarily about WAV/LPCM support, not DTS. Does mplex or ffmpeg support multiplexing DTS?

The manpage for mplex says "yes".
ffmpeg is, as usual , an unknown quantity at this point.

And those other tools you mentioned, that is the first I have heard of them. Are they GPL/LGPL?

http://ac3filter.net/projects/tools

http://mark0.net/contacts.html

[liquid217]

If mplex supports DTS, you should be able to rename the extension to one of the available extensions allowed in DVDAuthorGUI, and it should just work (like .mp2, or .ac3). Let me know if it does, and I can add .DTS to the filetype filter, so it can be opened in the GUI without needing to rename.