Mux AVI and AC3, possible?

[alph]

I've converted an m2v to Divx AVI using the DIVX mencoder preset (0.0.9tr4) without sound, and I was hoping to use the mux tool to add the original AC3 audio to this avi. The mux seems to work since the resulting file's size is the sum of of both the video and audio files, but, no matter what player I try, the audio does not play.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Alph

[Jacke]

What are you using for playback?

[alph]

I tried vlc, mplayer, and quicktime. All fail to play the ac3 audio when muxed with the avi. The original Ac3s do play however.

Alph

[Jacke]

Have you tried extracting (I assume you have the DVD) as a VOB file with both video and audio, then running that through ffmpegX, encoding video and passthrough audio? Would be interesting to see if that also has the same issues or if it's only a problem when muxing two files together.

[alph]

That was a good idea.

I tried with the vob and passthrough as you suggested, and the resulting avi did not even contain an audio track. I then tried to encode the vob to mencoder AVI by re-encoding the audio to ac3, and that too resulted in an AVI that had no audio track.

It seems FFMPEGX does not support AC3 in AVI. From my understanding this is not standard, nor is an AVI with MP3 audio for that matter.

Thanks,
Alph

[Jacke]

That's a bit strange... I have encoded from VOB w/ AC3 to AVI w/ AC3 before and it worked, so it could be a problem with the specific version you're using.

If you're comfortable with the command line, you could try combining the files manually. You show contents on ffmpegX and navigate to Contents/Resources/ffmpeg, then you drop that onto a Terminal window followed by "-i path/to/video.avi -vcodec copy -i path/to/audio.ac3 -acodec copy path/to/outfile.avi".

I'm going to try the latest version and see if I can reproduce the situation.

[alph]

Because of your last comment I decided to try converting an mpeg4/mp3 AVI to mpeg4/ac3 to see if that would work, and it did. I then re-acquired that original vob and tried that again, and that worked. Confused at this point, I tried to remember what I had done the last time and proceeded to test a few things.

As it turns out the problem was not FFMPEGX, but rather MPEG Streamclip 1.3.1. It appears that using the "Convert to MPEG" or the "Convert to m2v and ac3, " as I had done, in Streamclip to save your editing and then trying to encode in FFMPEGX produces the problem described above. Using the "Save as" command in Streamclip does not produce this problem however.

Another little quirk to remember.

Thank you for your help
Alph