AC3 handling, menus in VOBs, and life in general

[dror]

I'm trying to accomplish my first DVD (re)authoring mission, which is to convert a PAL DVD to NTSC and add subtitles. Pretty complicated for a first project, but I'm trying to recruit my years of computers and video editing experience for the battle.

Since the movie appears to be 25p (it was shot on video), I plan to reconfirm it to 23.976, resize the frame, and then add the subtitles and alter the menus.
So far, I backed up the movie to the HD and demuxed audio.

Questions:

1. DVD2AVI's demuxed AC3 streams are 448Kbps, "3_2ch". What does that mean?? Is that 5.1? Stereo? How can I analyze DVD audio to know its exact characteristics?
2. The vast majority of guides explain how to downmix the AC3 to MP2 or stereo in general. What for? to conserve space?
   This particular film is just an hour long and takes up 3.3GB, so no need for that. I'm planning to follow the "as-transparent-as-possible" rule. Why apply dynamic compression, normalize and downmix? Don't we trust the folks who authored the original DVD?
3. With that in mind, I'm trying to find a tool to time-stretch an AC3 file, and couldn't find any. What'd be the most swift way to do so?
4. What recommended apps can let you extract the menus from the VOBs, freely modify them and then reauthor? Probably the same tool I'll use for inserting the subtitles. (preferably for less than $5000)

Thanks,
Drew

[Baldrick]

Besweet can do ac3 to ac3 and change from 25fps to 23.976 time stretching. But I'm not sure if you can timestretch 5.1 ac3 audio.

[reboot]

#4, a quick look through the Tools list, coughs up at least 6 or 7, and some even free.

[dror]

I was working with BeSweet for a couple of hours today... couldn't do any kind of stretch whatsoever, either with the stable release or the latest beta, the standard GUI or BeLight, 5.1 or stereo, or MP2 or AC3. All I got was either the program terminated, or the output file turned out to be the exact same speed of the original.

And regarding #4... I just hoped for a few recommendations I know, for example, that not all of these tools can handle subtitles.

[reboot]

DVDecrypter, with DVDShrink and DVDLab Pro.
For audio, I use Goldwave, Audacity, Soundforge, and Ffmpeggui, depending on what exactly, I want to do with it. I have found besweet to be a POS, including a gui that is totally confusing (to me).