Female In Distress !!!! mp2 encoding has lots of aliasing!

[Shabubu]

Ok, doom9.net has got BeSweet, and alternative audio method, you'll need the GUI, SSRC and all of that boomph (links are posted on the news section). It can rip straight from the vobs so it might be worth giving it a go...

[sue denim]

Thanks to both of you for the new tips

Will get back to you with any news once I've given them a shot .......

Sue xxx.

[disturbed1]

My next reply was what both Shabubu, and poopyhead said.

BeSweet is very nice. GUI for Azid, Lame, tooLame, SSRC, and WavBoost.

I ripped a chapter and did the same steps as you with great results. It had 3/2 448k audio.

How do the files sound on your stand-alone?

[sue denim]

Hi disturbed .....

When playing back my VCD creations my stand-alone VCD player sounds just as bad as the MPEG1 files do on WMP.
To my 'sound engineering' ears it sounds like a nasty 8bit audio file rather than a 16bit one.
Maybe my soundcard is messing with the bit rate at playback (it DOES re-sample everything to 48kHz!)

But then how come YOU can hear the aliasing noise?!?!!
It doesn't really make a lot of sense does it?

It's got to be something I'm doing in the rip process.

Will get back to you as soon as I've tried BeSweet.

Thx,
Sue xxx.

[sue denim]

ARRRRGHHHHH!!!!!!!!

THIS IS TOTALLY DOING MY HEAD IN !!!!!

Now I've just about tried everything under the sun, all the great advice you guys gave, all my own ideas, even tried it on a mate's PC - AND THAT F**KING NOISE IS STILL THERE!!

Just for my own peace of mind can somebody PLEASE run through exactly what they do to rip a DVD->VCD ....
just so I know I'm not going crazy !

I'm about to invest in a new Pioneer DV-444 so I hope the playback on it will be better than the hunk-o-junk I got at the mo!

Have a great Christmas everybody!

Sue xxx.

[Sefy]

Sue, how about you create a disc and take it with you and check the quality of the audio before you buy it ?

And Merry Christmas and Happy Chanuka to everyone here!

[Headhunter3000]

I have exactly the same problem described here:

I am trying to do a DivX -> SVCD conversion of "Memento".

As the audio of the DivX was 48 kHz, I ripped it to uncompressed WAV with Virtual Dub.

Then I used CoolEdit and sampled it down to 44,1 kHz (Pre-/Post-Filter-Setting: 300).

The WAV file sounds fine - no strange noise in the upper freqs.

Then I use tooLAME to convert the 44,1 kHz WAV to MP2 (224 kbps, stereo (not joint), CRC on (necessary for SVCD)). my toolame command line looks like the following:

toolame -m s -b 224 -e input.wav output.mp2

(I also tried the TMPEG audio encoder - same result)

The resulting MP2 file sounds fine in WINAMP. But when played in windows media player (6.4 and 8) - the noise is there. Also when i multiplex audio and video and play it with PowerDVD (i think PowerDVD uses WMP codecs).

Now here comes the voodoo part:

When playing the mp2 on my older PC in WMP or the muxed video in WinDVD (sorry, no PowerDVD on this machine), the noise is gone(!)

Comparison of the two machines:

PC1 (the "hissing" one): PIII-500, WinXP Pro, SB Live 1024

PC2 (correct sound): PII-266, WinXP Pro, Yamaha OPL3 onboard

I have no clue what is going on here. This is some kind of strange.

Perhaps the WMP codec uses the PIII SSE technique and f***s something up??


Anyway, I will burn the SVCD in the next days and then I will write here if the noise is played on the standalone player (SONY DVP-NS900) as well.

Nevertheless: Merry Christmas to all of you!

[kinneera]

Based on what I'm reading from Sue and headhunter, it seems like the only possible explanation is the mp2 decoding, not any of the encoding steps. For whatever reason, it sounds like your MP2 decoder is not up to par, especially if it plays fine in Winamp but not WMP. Or you're just listening to it at too high of a volume. If your source is DVD, you should downmix (azid is great), downsample (SSRC produces good results for me), and normalize.

[sue denim]

Back Again!

Thanks again for all the support - you guys are great!

Yeah kinneera, I also now thinking it must be my mp2 decoder on playback.

Would really like to know how your Sony sounded HeadHunter.

Happy Christmas to everybody.

Sue xxx.

[Headhunter3000]

I burned the SVCD of the Memento video and played it on my standalone player (SONY DVP-NS900V).

Video is great, audio too. No hissing! (Thank God!)

Ok, I seem to be a bit paranoid, but I burned the CD on the PC where the hissing doesn't occur, but I am 99% sure that this doesn't matter .

So I can limit my problem to the WMP MPEG audio codec installation on my PIII. And indeed there is a difference between the codec on my PII and that on my PIII as I discovered today:

The hissing PC uses the standard Microsoft(?) MPEG1-video- and audio codec in WMP. The PC without problems uses the Ligos MPEG1 video- and audio codec in WMP.

I assume it was installed (without asking!) as I installed Roxio VideoPack 5. SoundForge 5 installs these codecs too, I think. It's very hard to get rid of them as they are deeply integrated into the system and there is no uninstall option. But it seems that the Ligos decoder is better than the standard MS codec (or just more foregiving to put it the other way around). So I'll keep it.

You can see what codec your PC is using by playing the mp2 in the old Windows Media Player (v6.4 / START -> Run... -> mplayer2.exe). Right-click on the player and choose "Properties" go to the last tab (in German it's called "Erweitert" ). Here the codecs used for the current clip are listed. You can double-click on each entry for details (manufacturer, statistics, version, ...).

There it says that the standard Microsoft MPEG-1 decoder is quite old. It's from 1997. So It could be possible that it uses an outdated standard or whatever.

As your DVD player also produces these strange sounds, it might also use an old decoder.

I don't know if you can get the Ligos decoder without any of the products described above. You can search for more information on www.ligos.com.

Perhaps there are other MPEG1-decoders that are installed as WMP codecs...


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Headhunter3000 on 2001-12-23 17:21:41 ]</font>

[sue denim]

Cheers HH - much appeciated!

I'm pretty much set on getting myself a Pioneer DV-444 as soon as Santa's left me some presents!
Hopefully, that should sort out my problem.

My WMP also has the old MPEG1 decoder (v2.0) but I also have Soundforge 5 installed and it doesn't appear to have 'over-installed' the new codec you spoke of.
Ah well.

Anywayz, thanks to everybody here who's contributed to the advice. As well as sorting my prob. out, I've also learnt heaps about audio encoding for video!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL AND YOUR FAMILIES.

Sue xxx.

[mjkc]

Hi

Just to throw another idea in !

I had problems with the sound as well. I could extact the audio from the MPEG2, amend so it sounded good and then re-multiplex and sound turned crap again (Hissing etc).

I discovered by changing my sound card it solved all the problems ! Have you tried a diferent sound card?

[sue denim]

Hi - hope everybody's having a phat xmas!

Thanks for the tip - Which soundcard do you suggest I change to then?

Just out of interest, what make of soundcard did you change from and what have you got now?

laters,
Sue xxx.

[Sefy]

Unfortunatly, Sound Blaster Live cards tend to cause alot of problems on lots of PC's (regardless of CPU type), I have a friend who recenetly changed his SB Live card to a Philips Accoustic Edge card, they both have the same price (55$) and he said all his problems vanished with the Philips card.