DVD burning software that supports 5.1 audio

[dnieper]

Is there any software lets you easily burn DVDs with 5.1 / surround audio, on Mac or Windows?

[johns0]

Imgburn for windows.

[dannyboy48888]

avstodvd is relatively easy or can be tweaked to your liking and supports imgburn for burning

[dnieper]

Thanks, guys- the Imgburn and AVStoDVD software does create 5.1 DVDs on my computer, but the audio always seems to be this "stereo-ified" stereo mix in the front-left and front-right speakers, with just some ambient noise/reverb in the other speakers. I tried adjusting some of the options to fix it, but I always got essentially the same result. I'll keep trying, but is there an easy way to get the software to just write the original file with minimal adjustments to the audio?

[october262]

You don't say what kind of files these are ( dvds , iso ect )
You might want to try dvdfab, with dvdfab you can slect which audio
Tracks you want and supports burning with imgburn.

[manono]

If your DVD assets (the components, such as the audio and video) are already compliant, you can tell AVSToDVD not to reencode them. Or, just create the video, add in the audio in Muxman and allow it to author the DVD for you. It can't reencode even if you wanted it to. It is a pure authoring program.

Test and then burn to disc using ImgBurn. Or take the M2V AVSToDVD makes for you (it's the video) and add both it and the audio (and chapters, if you created them also) to Muxman and have it author it for DVD.

So, the answer to your original question is 'yes'.

[awgie]

ImgBurn just burns the files to the disc. It doesn't create or modify the files.

Like October said, you didn't say what kind of files you're working with. Knowing that information would help us give you better advice.

Are you starting with a 5.1 audio source and just editing it? Or are you starting with a stereo source and trying to turn it into 5.1?

If you are starting with video files that already are in MPEG2 video/AC3 audio format (such as files extracted from another DVD), you don't need to convert with AVStoDVD. You could also try using DVDStyler, which will convert files if it has to, but not if conversion is not necessary.

[dnieper]

I think I got it to work, good enough for now, anyway. Thank you all very much for your help!!!

[dnieper]

On second thought, I'm pretty sure the quality of the files on the DVD is significantly inferior to the originals.

I'll try to describe the settings at each stage, but I'm not very familiar with all the terminology, so I'll err on the side of providing more information, even though I bet some of it doesn't matter:

These are *music* files, mixed in 5.1, with minimal video accompaniment. (I might eventually want to reduce the frames-per-second rate since the visuals are far less important than the audio, but that's probably an issue for another day...) There are a lot of instruments in the music, so it's important to preserve the mix among the 6 output channels. I used Final Cut Pro X to make the files, and I exported/"shared" them as "Video and Audio" files, in H.264, 720 x 480 resolution. Final Cut Pro seems to only be able to render them as AAC QuickTime movies, so that's what I did. When I play the actual resulting QuickTime movie files, it's not a good-sounding mix, which makes me worry, but when I import them back in to FCP, it sounds pretty close to the original, so I guess it might just be an artifact of the QuickTime software, but I don't know.

I'm making the original files on a Mac (which has a functioning 5.1 speaker setup), and then copying them over to my Windows computer, which doesn't have a 5.1 speaker system but does have the AVStoDVD and ImgBurn software.

Within AVStoDVD, I have Audio Preferences of AC3, 192 kbps, keeping AC3/DTS/MP2 DVD Compliant Audio, AC3 Audio Encoder: Wavi+Aften, forcing FFmpeg when temp WAV > 4GB, Auto Adjust Delay.

For all the "Direct Show Video Codecs" and "Direct Show Audio Codecs," I chose "LAV Filters."

Under LAVFilters Audio Configuration / Audio Settings, I checked "Auto A/V Sync correction," "Use Legacy 5.1 channel layout," (I had hoped that would solve the problem, but it didn't), and all the Output Formats.

Under LAVFilters Audio Configuration / Mixing, I checked "Enable Mixing" and "Clipping Protection" and had Center Mix Level, Surround Mix Level, and LFE Mix Level at 1.00, and checked "None" for Matrix Encoding.

Under LAVFilters Audio Configuration / Formats, I had all the Codecs checked except "wma," "wmapro," and "wmalossless."

When I add a song to the Project, the three lines say:
"Title1 (C:\Users\etc.....)
AVC - 3268 kbps - 720x480 - DAR 1.364 - 29.97 fps (CFR) - MBAFF (BFF) - 11:31 minutes - 20708 frames
AAC LC - 320 kbps - CBR - 6 ch - 48000 Hz - 11:31 minutes (0 ms delay) - Internal"

I've tried playing around with the settings, but eventually I'm just making wild guesses, and all the resulting DVDs sound about the same- it's as if the 5.1 mix was squashed to a stereo mix for the front and center speakers, and some ambient echoes were made for the rear speakers. All I want to do is preserve the mixes that I'm 95-percent certain are in the original files. Any further help in achieving this would be greatly appreciated!

[awgie]

If you're using Final Cut Pro X, you can create the DVD right there. If your Mac doesn't have a DVD burner and you need to transfer the files to your PC to burn it, you can still create the DVD in Final Cut, and save it as a disk image (.IMG) file. Then just use ImgBurn on your PC to burn that image onto the DVD.

http://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.3/#/ver6c4cb86b5

[dnieper]

It looks like it's impossible to make 5.1 DVDs within Final Cut Pro X. I couldn't do it, and googling the issue showed I was not the only one:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5112931?start=0&tstart=0
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4724376?start=0&tstart=0

I find it unbelievable that there would be no way to burn a 5.1 DVD using files rendered by FCP X. There must be a way.

[awgie]

You say that when you import the QT files back into FCPX, the audio sounds fine, so it sounds like the audio is indeed being exported into 6 distinct channels, but the channel mapping is what's off, so it's not playing back correctly. Am I reading you right? If the channels appear to be mapped correctly in FCPX (unless it's just assuming that a given channel plays through a given speaker and they're not actually mapped at all), then there is definitely a problem with the export function. But whatever that problem is, it is also replicated when importing files.

You could try importing your audio into Audacity and exporting it to 5.1 AC3 after correcting the channel map (you'll also need to install the ffmpeg library to import and export AAC and AC3 audio).