Audio decompress ? Confusion

[Matty-k]

My apologies in advance If this is either not possible, easy or just a very dumb question. Done various searches but have to confess to a lot of this forum going over my head at the moment.

Anyway: I was lead to believe that if i had an avi file which i wanted to convert into an mpg or dvd file to play on my dvd player, i would first have to turn it into a pcm file. This could be done by decompressing the audio with a tool called avi2vcd. A part of this tool is called decompress.exe.

After loading the 800mb avi file into decompress.exe and decompressing the result was a 2Gb pcm file.

I'm guessing I've got this very wrong because when i loaded the pcm file into MPEG Encoder the result was a 6 hr wait, an hour of which is still to go.

I cant say I'll be shocked when it turns out all wrong, but i would like to learn from my mistakes. So any info that could be thrown my way would be appreciated on where i went wrong.

[wulf109]

Try VSO divx to DVD. It will convert your avi to a DVD burnable directory and will convert the audio to ac3. It's in the tools section.

[bugster]

@Matty-k, what you have described sounds fine. Six hours to encode with Tmpgenc (Its far from being the fastest encoder) could be OK depending on your PC specs and encoder settings.

[Matty-k]

Suppose basically what I'm askin is. Was i right to decompress the avi file to end up with a pcm file?.

Thanks for the replys so far appreciate it

[celtic_druid]

If the avi had vbr mp3 audio and you are using TMPGEnc to convert, then yes.

[greengate69]

Your approach with Decompress.exe is fine. An alternative is to save a separate Wave (.wav) file using Virtual dub. Decompress.exe is a great little utility though, and has worked for me in the past where Virtualdub has failed. If it works then stick with it! You can feed the adio directly to TMGEnc under certain circumstances (not.ac3 though), but it is known to struggle with variable bitrate mp3.

As said above, the 6 hours is feasible depending on PC specs and the quality settings within TMPGEnc (motion search precision being the most significant - try "motion search estimate (fast)").