OK, I've been doing AVI > MPEG2 conversions for some time and realize I'll run into the occasional bad one here and there, but lately I've been having alot of audio/video sync problems. At first I thought pulldown was causing a problem as I never noticed it before, but now it appears it's happening during the conversion process, before I even initiate pulldown.

Anyway, the source is a spliced AVI (XviD) (I know, this may be a problem right away). I'll say the runtime is 02:00:00 for the original AVI and the framerate is 23.976. I've tried converting this to a DVD-compliant MPEG2 using TmpgEnc, Canopus 2.0, and CCE using both TheFilmMachine and via AVS scripting. The resulting MPEG2 is perfect quality and I'm very happy with it except that I'm getting a runtime that is now 5-7 seconds shorter (than the audio and original AVI). I had read in the forums that it could be that the authoring program is reporting an incorrect runtime length, but it has to be true since the audio lags behind the video as the movie progresses (starts out fine). The individual AVIs do not have a sync problem-before or after merging them.

This has since happened with 2 other AVI files I've tried to convert. I haven't noticed any errors in the AVIs (ran DivFix on them), so I'm not sure what it could be.

I've also seen some things concerning dropped frames during the conversion due to a number of reasons, but nothing that went into enough detail that would give me an idea to believe this is the case (I'm not ruling it out though).

I have tried varying number of passes (mostly 1-4) with the same results. If I am unable to correct this, is what about adjusting the audio playback length without cutting it (shrinking?). I saw a guide that shows how to slightly adjust the sampling rate of the audio to fit within the video runtime - would this be an advisable fix (if I can remember where I saw it).

If anymore information is required, I'll be happy to provide it. Thanks for any help.