Capture DPL / Flag as DPL?

[tmservo]

I'm using the ATI AIW-9700 card, and my stereo TV captures are pretty good; I am using it primarily as a PVR, and then we output to DVD once we've got a few eps of our shows.. anyway, the problem is:

These shows are all DPL. And they show as DPL when watching them live, etc. After capture, if I burn to DVD-R media, and watch on my player, it of course only comes up as stereo, no matter what burning method I choose.

Audiosync is excellent, so I don't really want to mess that up. Telling my receiver to go into DPL isn't -that- difficult, so it's just somewhat of a nuisance. Is there a way to flag this to tell the receiver to automatically take the stereo feed and treat as DPL?

[tmservo]

*shrug* I guess no one has any answer as to how to capture in DPL.

[Cornucopia]

1st- In a sense you ARE capturing in DPL.

Dolby Surround, DPL and DPL2 aren't "Multichannel" until they reach the decoder. Up to that point, they're just "special" (matrixed) stereo files/streams.

2nd- Your tuner/cap card gets a flag from the RF signal. It probably has a sideband or pilot tone or VITC coded signal that alerts your tuner that the incoming program is DPL. Once it gets captured, however, this gets stripped away, but it depends on how you're saving it.

3rd- What are you putting onto the DVD?
PCM audio and MP2 audio have no facility for a Dolby Surround flag, but AC3 does (what a coincidence-it's made by Dolby also! ). If you are, as I would guess, saving as PCM wave file, that's where the "flag" is lost. All AC3 encoders that I have seen (5 or 6, incl. SoftEncode & BeSweet) have the facility to add that flag.

4th- Even without the FLAG, you still have a Dolby Surround encoded stereo signal, you just have to manually engage the decoder instead of doing it automatically.

If you really want to do it automatically, get an AC3 encoder. In additional to solving the flag problem, it'll maintain the quality somewhat better than MP2 and keep the size much more compact than PCM.

HTH,
Scott

5th- It always helps to RTFMs. Go to Dolby's website for lots of tech info.

[tmservo]

This is a question I've had; yeah, what's happening is that I'm capturing in MPEG2 w/ATI's MMC 8.5 software, which puts the audio in PCM. This leads to a question.. I had thought that soft like DVDMoviefactory/etc. would do AC3, but apparently not.. what software out there will do this, I assume save back to a new file combined.. and how good are they at keeping audio Sync?