creating surround sound audio dvd

[David Stevens]

hi all,

Someone on one of the lists I'm on suggested that ffmpegX might well solve a problem for me - I'm downloading as I write, but as I'm such a total newbie to this I'm also going to ask for some advice here. So...
I've been working on a project with a visual artist, where I'm doing all of the sound work (design, recording, production and so on), and it's now been decided that the final pieces will be in surround sound.
While we're working on this, it would be very useful for the artist to take away dvds of the work in progress to listen to on a home cinema system at her flat. I'm using Cubase SX2, and I've reworked everything into 5.1, from which I can export a mix as either interleaved or separate channel 5.1 aiff files.
So the basic question is - can I convert these audio files and create a home cinema playable dvd using ffmpegX. and the second question is (showing my utter ignorance) do I have to include 'black' video along with the audio?
thanks for any help - I'm going to start looking through the manual now

David

[major]

Use a52decX 0.25, and set "Dolby" as output format.

[David Stevens]

thanks Major - I'm going to look at that now. There are a lot of new terms I'm coming across - given that (for the moment at least) surround audio is all I'm interested in, is there one of the How To articles that you would recommend I read? Or any other ueful introduction?

thanks again

David

[major]

http://www.dolby.com/ht/430.l.br.9904.surhist.pdf
http://www.dolby.com/tech/l.ml.9811.surmix.s.pdf

Please note that "Dolby surround" is not 5:1. a52decX will let you downsample 5:1 ac3 to Dolby surround wav or aif. ffmpegX can encode Dolby surround SVCDs starting from a DVD. However, if you want to encode 5:1 ac3 from separate audio tracks then you should use A-Pack from Apple.

[David Stevens]

Oops - I wasn't clear in what I was saying (but thanks for those links anyway - they're useful).
It's not the actual surround audio stuff that's new to me - it's the authoring/encoding/dvd stuff. Muxing for example (though I think I've figured that out from looking around the site) and the basic ideas or concepts or terms that are probably totally basic to everyone here. By "only interested in surround" I meant that creating 5.1 audio dvds was all I needed to do for now (I know what I'm doing up to the point where I have exported files from Cubase) - but I want to make sure I have a reasonable idea of how to go about preparing for and creating those dvds before I start wasting media!

David

[David Stevens]

and oops again - I hadn't seen the last part of your previous mail (underneath the links) till now...

[major]

https://www.videohelp.com/dvd

When you got your 5:1 .ac3 audio file, and .m2v mpeg-2 video file, you should author them as a DVD. You can use ffmpegX for that, or Sizzle, or DVD Studio Pro.

[David Stevens]

>Please note that "Dolby surround" is not 5:1.
Ah - of course; I had forgotten that.

So if I understand correctly, the process would be -
use A-Pack to encode 5.1 ac3 from my aiff files
downsample those files to Dolby surround using a52decX
use ffmpegX to encode an SVCD from dolby files
(is that last one right?)

If I'm right so far -
for what I want to do, SVCD is the format to use?
do you have a link for A-Pack?

thanks for your patience!

[David Stevens]

ah - we overlapped again!

ok, that looks neater

A-Pack to creat the audio files (a link would be good if you have it)
create an equal length .m2v file (presumably iDVD will do that fine)
use ffmpegX or Sizzle to author the DVD

thanks

[David Stevens]

and on this beautiful afternoon (at least here in watford)...

after a bit more poking around I found A.Pack - part of the DVD Pro package, so that's not something I'll be able to use.

Maybe I already have all the bits I need (?) - I'll have a look at it all & see if I can figure it out.