Distorted sound at begining on MPEG

[greenpig]

I have an AVI which I have produced in Adobe Premiere and then I have converted to MPEG-2 for SVCD.
The sound track I have added is purely music so no real sync issues. When I play the AVI, there is no problem but the MPEG (produced with TMPGEnc) has some sound distortion at the begining - the sound is fine for the first half a second and then goes slow for about 1.5 seconds. Since the start of the video sequence is static frames, I can not really say if the video is distorted too.

Until recently, I have been able to play the MPEG-2 files I produce on Windows Media Player (Version 7 I think) but now it refuses to play the file so there may be a setting in TMPGEnc I have got wrong. I can only test the resulting file on my DVD player (Philips 612S) and thats when I notice the problem.

I have spent hours experimenting with the quality settings to get an acceptable result and previous attempts have been fine on the sound but I am guessing that I have changed one too many settings and possibly changed something in the MPEG file that distorts the sound and prevents Media Player from recognising the file.

I have reduced the AVI from 480x576(PAL) to 440x528 so that I can see the whole frame on my DVD player. The AVI is at 25fps with every 15frames keyed, TMPGEnc then adds a black border to the image. The sound file is a simple WAV file at 44K 16Bit Stereo and that is also the output format of Premiere.

Any suggestions to investigate the distortion or remove it ?

[greenpig]

Well, I figured out why Media Player couldnt play the MPEG-2 files - it had crashed but maybe only the Drivers for MPEG-2. After a restart, it played them ok.

I still didnt notice any sound distortion on Media player though (?), so far the problem only exists on my stand-alone DVD player.

I took a closer look at the sound issue and it occurs on a number of different tests I have done. It is made worse by low pitch (bass) sounds near the begining of the track. This portion of the sound becomes stretched and distorts.

I switched on the Bit-Rate Indicator on my DVD player and neither the Audio or Video rates were any higher at the start of the movie than they are at any other part so I doubt whether it is down to that.

My next stage is to try bbMPeg which I hear might help.

[greenpig]

Firstly bbMPEG was a total disaster - broke the video beyond belief and move the sound to 5 seconds later than it should have been .... so back to TMPGEnc for all the encoding.

I managed to get a clearer view on the problem.
My video starts with a black screen, then after 2 seconds the music starts. After a further 2 seconds, the picture opens up (like the curtains at the theatre), to reveil the first 'real' frame which is held static for a souple of seconds.
The sound distortion takes place just as the first 'real' frame appears. I tried changing timings and moving the sound but it always distorts the sound during the first massive screen update. There are other such updates in the AVI but they cause no further problems.
I noticed that the counter on my DVD player remains ar "---" or "000" until the first 'real' frame starts to appear (this is a full 4 seconds into the MPEG). Afterwards, the counter updates as normal (what happened to my first 4 seconds).
I have resolved this, in the short term, by putting a count-down sequence with no sound at the begining of the movie. Now, any sound distortion would occur from the begining but since I have silence, it isnt noticed. Then the movie gets to the first 'real' frame, there is no sound distortion at all. Even the counter on the DVD player starts immediately.

From this, I conclude that my Philips 612S DVD player probably buffers the black frames on start-up until something interesting happens and when it does, it is too busy doing the video and the sound distorts.

If anyone knows what settings might help this, please let me know. If not, then I'll have to keep my custom intro sequence. The tools I have been using are ...
Adobe Premiere (to produce AVI from slides,WAV, and other AVI's)
TMPGEnc (to encode the MPEG's)
VCDImager Easy (to produce the SVCD)