Stupid audio question

[borghe]

Ok, I'm working in Scenarist, but I figure this can relate to any application. In working on converting the Star Wars Definitive Collection laserdiscs, I would like to include the commentary also. The annoying part is that I don't have enough space left on the disc to run another full length audio track, even at say 128Kbps. The good news is that not every chapter on the laserdiscs have commentary. So here comes the stupid question. Is there anyway I can populate an audio track withy only segments of audio leaving the rest of the track empty? Even if I create a track with no noise in between commentaries, it will still take up bandwidth, and as far as I know AC3 doesn't support VBR. So do I have any options? I basically have about 40MB left on the disc and the commentary is a total of 28 minutes. For the record the movie is 121 minutes.

[borghe]

anyone?

[Oliver]

Have you tried compressing the audio commentary in mp2? Say at 128Kbps mono to save the most amount of space? I think you can mix the audio formats on a DVD.

[chazzie]

I assume the audio commentary is only voice, no music, hence you can convert the track into dual mono @ 64 kbit/sec, this will reduce the amount of space used while preserving adequate audio quality. Otherwise, just re-encode the video with 100 kbit/sec lower bitrate, that way your commentary track will fit.