Encoded DVDrip with wrong audio codec... what now?

[Downgraded286]

I have a bunch of DVDrips which I've encoded with HE-AAC audio. Unfortunately, I don't find out until now that my target device is not compatible with this, and I should have used AAC.

What I've done is downloaded fre:ac, loaded up all my DVDrips, and let it transcode each one into AAC for me. This has led to some odd behavior. The tracks don't show their correct length, and it's all over the place depending on what I use to open it. Groove Music, Winamp, and MPC-HC all show quirky behavior and different lengths for them.

The next problem is what to do from here. Originally I planned to fix each file with MKVToolNix by loading up the DVDrip with its respective counterpart from fre:ac, deselecting the already present HE-AAC track and adding the AAC track. Problem is, this puts out a .mkv Matroska file, which is also not going to work. I need .mp4.

How do I fix this mess?

[hello_hello]

I wouldn't worry about the incorrect lengths if the output files are AAC. The players are just guessing. Encoding as AAC in an MP4 container might have been a better idea.

You could try MyMP4BoxGUI (I assume the rips are MP4) but when I tried the original audio stream didn't show up so I couldn't prevent it from being muxed. MeGUI's MP4 muxer worked okay (under the Tools menu). It lets you load an MP4 as the video input and it ignores any audio within, so you can add another audio stream and mux.

Video To Video Converter. It has an audio/video muxer under the Tools menu and I got it to work by loading an MP4 as the video, an AAC file for the audio, then when the list of conversion presets pops up after clicking okay, I selected the MP4 preset, changed the video and audio codecs to copy on the right, and to make it play nice with AAC streams, I added this to the extra parameters section:
-bsf:a aac_adtstoasc
Click okay, and convert.

You can only mux them one at a time that way. If you want to batch mux, maybe forget the aac encodes you've already created and load he MP4 rips into Video To Video Converter, select the MP4 preset again, then copy for the video codec, but leave the audio codec set for AAC encoding. When you run the job Video To Video Converter will re-encode the audio again, but it'll copy the video and mux them into a new MP4. You should be able to do the whole lot as a single batch job that way.

[Downgraded286]

Well, I got the file lengths right by changing to MP4 file format instead of AAC in fre:ac, as you said.

I'll give video to video converter a shot, so I can do them automatically. Going through 345 files to fix them manually would be quite a pain. If not, I'll go through MyMP4Box.

Thanks for the support!

[Downgraded286]

If I ever find the troll mason who keeps building brick walls in my path, I'm gonna kick him in the nuts. VideotoVideo is giving me this crap:

#3680.5: creation_time : 2015-11-25 06:41:59
#3680.5: handler_name : SubtitleHandler
#3680.5: ParseOptions for output file: -f mp4 -c:v copy -aspect 1.467 -r 23.976 -b:v 1024k -c:a ac3 -ac 2 -ar 44100 -b:a 96k -vf "setdar=1.467,scale=704:480"
#3680.0: At least one output file must be specified
ERROR: At least one output file must be specified....TASK: Z:\Output\South Park S04e09.mp4

[hech54]

If I ever find the troll mason who keeps building brick walls in my path, I'm gonna kick him in the nuts.
ERROR: At least one output file must be specified....TASK: Z:\Output\South Park S04e09.mp4

Going through 345 files to fix them

Maybe you should re-rip these 345 DVDs that you OWN.....it might be quicker.

[Downgraded286]

Was I supposed to leave them all as title00, title01 etc as MakeMKV left them?

I named them that way so Plex, my media server app, would understand them properly:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200220687-Naming-Series-Season-Based-TV-Shows

[videobruger]

If you're using MakeMKV why not have it do the audio encoding:

[hello_hello]

If I ever find the troll mason who keeps building brick walls in my path, I'm gonna kick him in the nuts. VideotoVideo is giving me this crap:

#3680.5: creation_time : 2015-11-25 06:41:59
#3680.5: handler_name : SubtitleHandler
#3680.5: ParseOptions for output file: -f mp4 -c:v copy -aspect 1.467 -r 23.976 -b:v 1024k -c:a ac3 -ac 2 -ar 44100 -b:a 96k -vf "setdar=1.467,scale=704:480"
#3680.0: At least one output file must be specified
ERROR: At least one output file must be specified....TASK: Z:\Output\South Park S04e09.mp4

Video To Video Converter's errors don't always seem to make sense. I assume it's just displaying the ffmpeg error messages and that might require the user being fluent in ffmpeg-speak.

I got FFQueue to work today. I hadn't suggested it originally as it was giving me an error about not being able to copy the video. When I tried today using an MP4 as the source, it worked fine. Maybe it doesn't like copying the video when the audio source is a different file, or maybe it's because I tested with an MKV, but copying the video and re-encoding the audio from an MP4 source works.
You need to first create a preset for copying the video and re-encoding the audio. That's not hard, just click on the Preset button. When you open the source MP4s, the Edit Job window opens. Make sure the preset you created is selected at the bottom before adding the jobs to the queue. FFQueue should do the job and it'll batch encode.
You need to download ffmpeg yourself. I'm pretty sure the latest builds all work with FFQueue but if not I can vouch for version 2.8.2 as that's what I'm using. You need a static build. http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/win32/static/
Just unzip and copy ffmpeg.exe and ffprobe.exe to the FFQueue folder (I don't think ffplay.exe is required but it won't do any harm). Or you can put them somewhere else and tell FFQueue where to find them under Options.

For Video To Video Converter I tried again using an MP4 as the source video. I think I'd tested previously with an MKV I had handy, but this time I had a the same problem. Maybe try an older version of Video To Video Converter. I recall having some issues with the latest version at one stage so I'd kept version 2.8.9.28 around. It copied the video while re-encoding the audio in my MP4 without a problem. At the time, I suspected there'd been changes to ffmpeg, maybe relating to the command line options, that the newer versions of VTVC hadn't accounted for, but that was just a guess as I'm not fluent in ffmpeg-speak. You can find version 2.8.9.28 under "old versions" on the VideoHelp page for VTVC.

MeGUI's OneClick encoder should do it, and batch encode, but it can be a bit fiddly to set up if you're not familiar with MeGUI-speak.

[Downgraded286]

@videobruger I wasn't aware that existed. While it won't help me here and now, it's worth looking at in the future.

@hello_hello another automated option worth exploring before I manually delve through the files one by one... thanks!

Hm... FFQueue works... almost perfect. I have it set to copy subtitles. On files that don't have subtitles, it now adds a subtitle track, and all it says is what chapter I'm on. Kinda irritating that being there... Also, some files have two audio streams. So far I haven't found an automated solution for this either. It seems the only way to save both audio streams would be to demux the file, transcode both streams, and remux it. Not super worried about it at the moment, for the episodes that have it they're both in English, and they seem to be identical anyway. I thought maybe one would be the censored version, and one would be uncensored, but they both have the blips so can't be that.

[hello_hello]

For me, FFQueue wouldn't add files without subtitles to the queue in batch mode if subtitles were selected in the "Batch Make" window. The result was this:



Unless in your case it's doing something silly like converting chapters to subtitles if it doesn't find a subtitle file. I haven't tested that.

I haven't found an easy way around the two audio streams problem yet. The "Batch Make" window asks for a preferred audio codec which seems to imply it's only going to re-encode one audio stream. When I tried an MP4 with two audio streams in non-batch mode, it happily processed both, but batch mode seems limited to one, which is a bit disappointing. Maybe that's a limitation of having to create a "one size fits all' command-line and using a custom command-line in batch mode seems almost impossible.

I might see if I can find an alternative ffmpeg GUI later, or maybe experimenting with doing this from the command-line. I've rarely used ffmpeg myself and batch scripts even less, so it's a learning experience for me. I thought someone may have come along and offered a batch script by now.

[hello_hello]

Please note, all the command lines below are supposed to have a colon between "c" and "s" to specify copying the subtitles but the forum software keeps turning that into a smiley so I had to use a full stop instead.

Okay.... WinFF this time.

Install WinFF (probably wouldn't hurt to replace the ffmpeg files included with it with newer ones), and use the Edit/Presets menu to create a new preset. I haven't tested the subtitles part yet, but I'm optimistic. It works for MP4s with both one or two audio streams. Call the preset whatever you want to call it. Likewise for the label. Use MP4 as the output extension and the following for the command line:

-map 0 -c:v copy -c:a ac3 -b:a 192k -c.s copy

(The problem with FFQueue seems to be it's insistence on controlling the -map parameter. WinFF doesn't)

Save the preset and select it in the main window. Add the input files. I haven't worked out if there's a limit but you can add single or multiple input files the same way.

Click on Convert.

Hopefully that'll do it, converting any audio to 192kbps AC3.

It seems the command line for 128kbps AAC would be this:

-map 0 -c:v copy -c:a aac -strict experimental -b:a 128k -c.s copy
or
-map 0 -c:v copy -c:a libvo_aacenc -b:a 128k -c.s copy

If you want to try other aac encoders there's some info here:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AAC
What works depends on the version of ffmpeg you have. Apparently the one I've downloaded doesn't include fdkaac so I couldn't test that, but I was running out of motivation by that stage anyway. I'm slowly getting my head around ffmpeg though.

(Edit: I initially downloaded the portable version of WinFF but it wouldn't run. I don't know it it's an XP thing or if it's 64 bit, but the installer version worked)

[Downgraded286]

Well, WinFF did the same thing FFQueue did, but I got FFQueue to work normally by separately processing those with and without subtitles.