VOB with AC3 Audio -> MPG with MPeg Audio

[wcb4]

I am not really sure that this would be the right forum, but since I am trying to convert something, and since I have not seen this stuff covereed elsewhere, I'll post and see if anyone yells at me.

I recently bought a Hauppage Media MVP. It's a nice little machine. I keep all of my media on a server in my basement and any place with a TV and ethernet (which is every room in my house) can access the media. The idea is to have all of the kids video on the media server so that we do not have to keep swapping out DVDs every time they get tired of Elmo and want Winnie the Pooh instead. The problem is this.....

Many, in fact most of my DVDs have AC3 audio, not mpg audio and the MVP dows not handle AC3 audio. Which means that to add a video to the server, I have been converting the VOBs to MPG (but this keeps the audio as AC3) then demuxing the audio and vido, running the AC3 through conversion to MPG audio, then remuxing the new audio with the original video. This is, to be quite plain about it, a pain in several parts of the anatomy (namely my neck and a$$) so I would like to know, is there a simple one step for joining VOBs to MPG and converting the audio from AC3 to MPG audio on the fly.

If not, can anyone recommend some nice fast tools for doing th econversion. Currently its TMPGenc DVD Author to combine the VOBs to MPG, then I use DVD2AVI to give me a wav of the audio, which tmpgenc converts to mpg audio, then tmpgenc to remux the audio (I did find one tool to actually convert hte ac3 audio that tmpgenc's demux produces to wav or mpg directly, but it was excruciatingly slow (said it was going to take over an hour on a 3.4GHz P4).

ANy help would be appreciated.

[jimmalenko]

You're pretty much doing it one of the best ways now, unfortunately. The only thing I'll recommend is to use VOB2MPG to converts the VOBs to an MPEG file, demux using TMPGEnc's MPEG Tools then use ffmpeggui, belight or besweet to convert to MP2, then remux with TMPGEnc's MPEG Tools.

One other method I just thought of would be to use Stream Processing when you rip, which would create an M2V and an AC3 file, saving you the initial demux.

In fact, it's also quite possible that if you knew your way around batch files and commandline input programs, you could develop a GUI that could handle all this with a couple of clicks, as DVDDecrypter can rip and demux, besweet and ffmpeg can convert, and mplex can mux.

[TerryG]

Try a VideoStudio 9 or DVD MoiveFactory trial:

http://www.ulead.com/download/trial.htm

Share-Create Disk-Import DVD-next-Create DVD Folders

Use the tools at the bottom of the final screen to change the MPEG settings.

[jimmalenko]

Try a VideoStudio 9 or DVD MoiveFactory trial:

http://www.ulead.com/download/trial.htm

Share-Create Disk-Import DVD-next-Create DVD Folders

Use the tools at the bottom of the final screen to change the MPEG settings.

Wouldn't that be re-encoding the video too though ?

[celtic_druid]

mencoder.exe -ovc copy -oac twolame input.vob -o output.mpg

libavcodec's mp2 encoding is not as good as twolame, but you could do the same thing with ffmpeg.

[SatStorm]

wcb4, I do the same with you.
I demux with dvd2avi, encode the wave using TMPGenc (tooLAME), then remux with TMPGEnc tools.
An alternative is to encode wav / ac3 with dbamp using the mp2 plug in, but it is not tooLAME (regarding audio quality)...

[celtic_druid]

twolame should be the exact same quality. Some mencoder builds would still have it enabled. I used to compile mencoder with toolame myself, but switched to twolame when it was added.

Who wants to demux, re-encode and remux when you can do it all in one go?

[wcb4]

****UPDATE*****


Womble's mpeg2vcr can make short work of this. I still use TMPGENC DVD Author to join the vobs into a single mpg with ac3 audio (because its faster) but then open that mpeg file with mpeg2vcr and just hit save, select mpeg audio and dvd video.... takes about 6 minutes on my machine and its done. I know it can not be recoding the video (a p4 3.4 is not THAT fast but the resutling audio is mpeg audio.... Not I just need to pay for ht efull veriosn of mpeg2vcr... looks like it can also write a svcd , or vcd video stream as well , and it can read the vob files, so it might just be a one stop shop for creating standlone mpegs from any source.

BTW, I highly recommend the mediaMVP... Its a nice device

[pepegot1]

jimmalenko wrote:
<<Wouldn't that be re-encoding the video too though ? >>
For VS 9:
If you select render same as clip, from the pulldown menu, it will do it quickly using smart rendering, thus cutting down on the time considerably.