Audio plays on one player, not on another, on authored disk

[tbessie]

I created a movie and soundtrack, which I authored using DVD-lab. It works on my cheapish Panasonic home theater all-in-one box, but my nice new Integra (Onkyo) box doesn't play the audio on it.

What could be causing this problem? The audio tracks are MPEG, and the Integra shows "MPEG" as audio type, so I'm stumped as to why this might be happening.

What sorts of things ought I check?

- Tim

[canadateck]

Integra Onkyo Does not play Mpeg Audio. Try Ac3.

[tbessie]

Wow, that's nice to know. Why would they do something like that, on a mid-range player like this, when my cheap ol' Panasonic works fine? Is this a question of paying for MPEG licenses or something?

Incidentally, is one or the other audio type superior?

- Tim

[ZippyP.]

Mpeg audio is not DVD spec for NTSC when it is the only audio track. Some players are more fussy about that than others. AC3 is DVD spec for NTSC so on that standpoint you would have to say that it is superior. For your purposes they should sound the same.

[tbessie]

Thanks to you both -- well, I guess that means that my new player is more "compliant", but less flexible. As an engineer, I understand the desire to make things bow to standards, but in a world where there are lots of MPEG-2 audio streams on home-cut DVDs, I wish they'd consider that in their boxes, so that they were more useful to us all.

So now I need to add another MPEG2-to-AC3 conversion in my authoring process. Ah well, c'est la vie.

- Tim

[tbessie]

By the way, I just found a great explanation of the state of DVD audio here:

http://emusician.com/mag/emusic_audio_options_dvdvideo/

- Tim