Adding audio channel to finished DVD

[fabian1323]

Hi all,

Here is my situation, I have recorded old home videos from tape to DVD.
These DVD's contain multiple short videos (not chapters) and include a menu to select these videos.
During the recording something went wrong and only one audio channel got recorded, when you play the DVD's now only one speaker works in stereo mode.

Is there any way for me to duplicate the single audio channel on these DVD's so that it will sound sort of as stereo without losing the chapter menu and order of the clips?

If anyone could give me any tips that's much appreciated! I'd rather not go through the process of making the menu and everything for all the DVD's all over again...

Thanks in advance.

Fabian

[jman98]

It CAN be done. But I will be honest with you. It's one of those "If you have to ask, you probably can't do it" kind of things. But I'll tell you generally what you have to do.

Look at this guide, which is actually about adding a new subtitle file to an existing DVD and keeping the original menus, but is completely applicable to what you need to do.
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/277950-How-to-add-new-subtitles-to-an-existing-DVD
You need to demux your original DVD just like the guide says. Then you would take the audio, fix it (I only know of a commercial program that could duplicate AC3 audio from one channel to 2 if that's what you have for audio and you do NOT want to spend what it would cost to buy this program), and follow the steps in the guide, skipping the stuff about adding new subtitles and replacing the old audio in the mux process with muxman with the new fixed audio.

There may be someone who knows a free program that can do what you want with the audio. Maybe they can talk about that. ffmpeg might be able to fix the audio, but I'm not an experienced user of that. I just point it out as a possible solution.

Basically the process in the guide is:
demux audio and video
fix audio
remux audio and video
replace new muxed file into ripped DVD
burn

[fabian1323]

Well following that guide and some tweaking here and there I was able to do it!
Guess it's not always true that this is a "If you have to ask, you probably can't do it" case haha!
Thanks so much for pointing me in the right direction!
The audio editing was possible with Audacity and FFmpeg codecs for the AC3 files.

[jman98]

Awesome!

We get a ton of new members here who can't do anything more complicated than click 2 or 3 buttons, so it's good that the guide helped you and you were willing to actually do some work to fix the issue. Sometimes it gets discouraging that we give advice to tell people how to do exactly what they asked about then they completely ignore it and don't get their problem fixed or they decide it's "too hard" because they have to actually do a little work to fix the issue instead of monkey clicking on buttons. Nice to see that you're NOT one of those people!

[fabian1323]

Haha yeah I can imagine!
I'm not that much into DVD editing and audio stuff but I have a good general understanding of audio/video and how a computer and programs work.
I did this for my father actually since he made the DVD's but messed some stuff up
But glad I got this done, thanks again