Uploading bilingual vcds into iTunes

[Raymo]

I am new to all of this ripping DVDs and uploading them into iTunes and this forum too. However, reading around has been helpful and it has been surprisingly straight forward so far using handbrake. The difficulty I have is converting vcds into an iTunes friendly format whilst keeping the Chinese soundtrack. I would be grateful if anyone could help me out here. On reading some of the posts I have a feeling that AlanHK could help me out but he doesn't address the issue that I am having directly. Is there anyway I can contact him directly?

[Baldrick]

What happens if you try convert the vcd dat file in handbrake?

I would guess that your VCD has a stereo track with different audio in the right and left audio channels.

[Raymo]

Handbrake converts the at file ok but the audio is only in English. I have tried the other option of the audio output as mono and since it doesn't give me a choice of which side, left or right, it simply mixes the two languages together. The stereo output only gives thhe result in English for some reason. Anyone with any straightforward ideas?

[jman98]

I don't know about using Handbrake to do this, but it CAN be done. It may require you to do a very time consuming and manual process though.

The basic idea would be:
1) Use VCDGear to rip the DAT file into a single MPG file.
2) Demux the MPG file into separate audio and video files.
3) Put the audo through an audio editor that understands MPEG-1 layer II audio and produce a 2 channel audio file from the Chinese side of the audio.
4) Remux the video and Chinese only audio into a new MPG file.
5) Use Handbrake on this new MPG file.

I haven't tried but there's some chance that Xvid4PSP may be able to handle the audio correctly if you go into the advanced settings. Or you might be able to edit the AviSynth script it works from and get the one channel you want and then feed that script into Xvid4PSP for processing. I don't use AviSynth at all for audio processing, but it can do it. ffmpeg might also be able to work with your audio file and generate a Chinese only file as output, but I'm no expert in its settings. I just suggest possible tools here.

You can send a PM (Private Message) to AlanHK. I've gone to him in the past for a VCD issue and he's a nice guy. You'll need to find a post he's responded to and then click on the icon that looks like an envelope to send him a PM.

[Raymo]

Sounds like quite a convoluted way round.... Might give it a go though if there's no other way. I have pm'd alanhk so there might be another way Thanks for the tip. Some have mentioned audacity. Is that do something similar to what you have suggested?

[jman98]

Audacity can import the audio format that VCD uses, but it's unclear to me if it can save to that format (MPEG-1 layer II). You may need to save to something like WAV and then find another program that can convert that to MPEG-1 layer II. I think BeSweet can do that. Other tools may also be able to.

Yeah, it's a real mess to deal with VCDs with one language on one channel and another language on the other channel.

[hech54]

I don't understand.
Do you want to keep both left and right languages....or just one language?
Once you get the MPEG file from the VCD, you should be able to just drag that MPEG video file into GoldWave, select the left or right channel and save as a WAV file.
TDA has the ability to create a DVD(VOB file) with multi-lingual audio.

[jman98]

Raymo wants to use Handbrake to encode VCDs into something iTunes will accept. Raymo also only wants to keep one language.

I don't use Handbrake, but I suppose if you follow my instructions you could mux the video with the audio even if it's WAV format audio and not MPEG-1 layer II and Handbrake could probably encode it correctly. So that could save you some time. I'm not familiar with GoldWave but you should look into that suggestion.

[MOVIEGEEK]

The old TMPGEnc can do this, just use the built-in audio tools and output to MPEG-1.


http://www.dvd-guides.com/content/view/57/59/

[AlanHK]

Well, I'm afraid I'm not the white knight here.
HK VCDs often use the single stereo track allowed to put two languages, one left and one right. Local VCD and DVD players can handle this.
I don't use Handbrake, but it doesn't seem to have any options to split the soundtrack, only to downmix.

jman98's post is basically how I'd do it:

VCDGear to extract an MPEG1
demux with eg TMPGenc (The free version can do this)
open audio with Audacity and split tracks, save desired track as mono.
Once in Audacity the audio is basically wave, so as audio just has to be able to be muxed back with the MPV. If wave will work use that, it'll save a conversion.
Mux the new audio with the video using TMPGenc.
Now I think that Handbrake can take the MPG.

I suspect that an ffmpeg wizard could do all this in one command.
See http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#Audio-Options and "-map_channel"
It takes some sweat (for me) to get a working ffmpeg command line, but once you do, it's magic.

ffmpeg documentation isn't very user friendly.

The following example splits the channels of a stereo input into two separate streams, which are put into the same output file:
ffmpeg -i stereo.wav -map 0:0 -map 0:0 -map_channel 0.0.0:0.0 -map_channel 0.0.1:0.1 -y out.ogg

-- not exactly what you want, but getting there.

It would be worth working out if you had a lot of VCDs to process.

Maybe something like:
ffmpeg -i stereo.wav -map 0:0 -map_channel 0.0.0:0.0 -y out.ogg
would just save the left channel.
Then add more parameters to convert the video and you're done...