AC3 compatibility problems

[Jackinbox]

I'm trying to figure out which encoder to use on AVI files which are MP3 in their original source. I have always used MPEG audio since that's what CCE will output after converting the AVI audio to WAV. I have never had a problem with MPEG audio even though it's never been part of the standard for NTSC. As a matter of fact, I've been shocked that I have yet to find a player that wouldn't play MPEG audio. Yes, I know they exist but none of my friends or family had any problems.

Anyway, just to make my stuff more "in spec", I decided I should encode with AC-3 2.0. I made a 15 minute test disc. I did everything the same as usual except this time I encoded the WAV audio to AC-3 2.0 with FFmpegGUI. Then I muxed everything together as normal.

I got a rather weird result.

The first time I put the finished disc in the player...No sound at all

The 2nd time....sound played fine all the way through

The 3rd time...sound played for about 90 seconds, then dropped off and never came back on.

The 4th time...sound played fine all the way through.

So now I'm trying to figure out the source of the problem. Perhaps I had a wrong setting in FFmpegGUI (I used 192 bitrate, 48000 sampling rate). Or perhaps this is the incompatibility problem I've read about after doing some searches here. I read that BeLight is now "in-spec" so perhaps I should try that. I just used FFmpegGUI because it seemed to be what most of you are using.

Maybe I'll just go back to MPEG audio since it seems to work, but I'd like to encode AC3 since I might need it at some point in the future.

Anyone have any thoughts?

[yoda313]

Hello,

Try different blanks. If it works sometimes but not others it might be a bad batch of dvdr's.

But yeah MPEG audio works just fine in NTSC players. My hauppauge wintv pvr250 only records in mpeg audio and I've never had a problem.

Kevin