Authored DVD has audio lag/out of sync on one dvd player?

[Rauli]

Hello all,

First I would like to thank you for taking the time to read my posting. My problem is I author one dvd for my own business purposes, I give the dvd out to people for them to watch and then those interested in the product contact me and sales are made. I the video footage is from two .wmv files from the companies website for which I have received permission to diffuse in the format of dvd and it is totally legal.

1. First of all I convert to .wmv to an avi with uncompressed video and pcm audio at the same frame size which is 320x240@30fps, this takes up over 1gig in space for 3mins17secs of footage and I use AVS Video Convertor 3.1.

2. Then because of the low resolution I try to maintain quality with virtualdub. I resize adding borders (because tvs often crop the image from dvd) to 720x576@25fps which is PAL dvd standard (I use frame drop function I think it is) and I use the lancoz (cant remember the name) filter and this produces I think the best resize possible.

3. Then I save again as uncompressed video and leave the audio at pcm, this .avi takes up over 5gig for the 3mins17secs.

4. Again I employ AVS Video Convertor 3.1 and use 'avi to dvd' but not as a one stop solution, I let it encode at 'excellent quality PAL DVD' at a video bitrate of about 4.7mbits and mpeg audio at 224bits and 48khz, the audio stream cannot be saved in any other format in this application (AVS Video Convertor 3.1). This application creates a dvd filesystem with no menus or any buttons and it just automatically plays the single vob made from the avi (when played in Powerdvd XP 4.0 or burnt to dvd and played on dvd player) and it then tries to burn a dvd from this which I cancel for reasons you will soon see. Even though I cancel it leaves the generated files. I repeat this process for the other video file; I have a total of two video clips on this dvd.

5. Now I create the dvd with simple menus using DVD Styler (1.5b) which still is beta but if you avoid some features it seems to work ok (this is in windows 2000 pro sp4a). I import both the made vobs from the folders AVS Video Convertor 3.1 made and assign them to menu buttons with a short description imported next to it as a bitmap with transparency. I also add a 'root' menu which has additional information about the products including a price list which navigating through you return to the main video menu.

6. Dvd styler then calls upon the other .exes that then generate the dvd from what I had designed in it, I just generate the files and no .iso image or anything. Then I use nero express 6.0 to burn the dvd files made by Dvdstyler 1.5b. I tell nero express 6.0 to burn as DVD-ROM booktype with "Maximum compatibility" option enabled as well with my TDK DVD+R blank printable media (I print a label afterwards or before I burn the dvd). I think however the "Maximum Compatibility" only applies to DVD-R media since I notice when using DVD-R the burn area is larger from the extra 1gig of junk data I guess. I use a benq 1650 ATAPI drive on a PIII 800, 512megs legend ram, Intel made desktop board, Albatron MX4000 AGP etc etc with seagate hard drives and one Liteon dvd-rom drive in parallel with the Benq dvd burner, not anything modern but this setup I have is rock solid hardware.

7. Now, the dvd works perfectly in PowerDVD XP 4.0 in both Windows XP and 2000 Pro, on a playstation 2 and xbox 360, however I tested on a cheap dvd player from Dick Smith Electronics (bit like radio shack) this dvd player is nothing more than a rebranding of a cheap dvd player made in china, and when playing this dvd I made the sound lags. At first works fine and what the man speaks in the footage is in total sync but as it continues after about 30seconds you notice footage is ahead of expected sound and his lips are obviously out of sync with the audio coming out. If I pause the footage and resume again its fine but declines as the clip progresses. Now, I'm not using fancy applications but I think I should be getting 'perfect' results, my suspicion is that the cheap dvd player handles mpeg audio less well as opposed to ACC or pcm. I played a movie, Narnia on this dvd player and two times there was brief video corruption but the sound was always in perfect sync from start to finish. This movie uses Dolby sound which is ACC if memory serves me correctly.

The important thing to me is that the dvd is reliable and presentable, lagging sound is embarrasing to me and probably causes business to suffer since it appears unprofessional. I am considering re-authoring the dvd using ACC or PCM sound but have not worked out how to do this yet.

My question is, what do people think of all this? Where am I going wrong? I have worked this method of authoring out myself and have not used and guides apart from one that advised me to add the borders to the footage because tvs often crop the image from dvd's.

Thank you for reading my post and hopefully I will get some response to which I will much appreciate.

Rauli Kumpulainen
Amateur dvd author.

[guns1inger]

First thing is to test it on a decent DVD player. I would not consider a games console a sound test, especially a PS2. Neither would I consider DSE banded players to be a solid test.

What media did you use ?

Are you sure there is no lag when played back on other devices ? I ask only because of the strange process you go through, the various framerate changes (often a cause of sync issues) and the somewhat questionable software used in some parts.

If I were doing the same conversion, I would only convert to NTSC VCD resolution (352 x 240) at 29.97 fps, and author as an NTSC DVD. This will play fine in your Australian DVD players and TVs, and save you a lot of needless phaffing around.

[InXess]

Lagging sound may be due to several reasons, file corruption being the most prominent. You need to test make a DVD with different audio formats and find the one that works. Try other DVD players for consistency. Quite likely your authoring program is causing that. Try authoring with different application. No way someone could tell at what stage this particular error gets introduced so you need to change your process accordingly, replace suspected apps files etc. with another to see how it affects the outcome. Testing on 1 low-end DVD player is hardly conclusive though.

[Rauli]

Hello,
Thanks for your replies. I remember now recently that I also used the same dvd on a phillips dvd player and it played correctly. I have also used it on a portable dvd players branded Coniq, DSE and an LG on which they played correctly I apologize in forgetting to mention these. I was not aware PAL dvd players would support NTSC, I assumed if any support it would be limited but the extra 30fps would add fluidity unless the dvd player chops them off. From what I know virtualdub compensates for dropped frames without distorting the timeline but then again maybe otherwise. Yes my methods are questionable using workarounds and the like but I was not initially keen to purchase a commercial dvd authoring program because I was not sure if this business venture would succeed but now that it has I may have to invest in one. Yes testing on a game console is not as good as a ordinary dvd player but I included these in my testing regime, the more the merrier.

The disc medium I used as mentioned in my first post is TDK +R printable burnt on a benq 1650 with latest firmware using nero express 6 with DVD-ROM booktype and 'maximum compatibility' enabled at the lowest speed available, 4x.

I will try to split the streams and encode a ripped pcm wav at 48khz into ACC if I can get my hands on a free encoder and from what I suspect the support for ACC encoders vary in quality even commercial ones. I got a feeling vobedit can help me here, just from the name of the program.

I may have to try the low resolution NTSC DVD and see how that looks.

Thanks,
Rauli

[guns1inger]

Give ffmpeggui a go for AC3 (not ACC) conversion. It's not certified, but it works reasonably well.

Pretty much all Australian players and TVs are multi-format in some manner. The best option is a player and TV that will use the format of the disc. That is PAL will be output and displayed as PAL, and NTSC will be output and displayed as NTSC. Some players will read NTSC and output PAL or pseudo PAL (basically PAL resolution but at 60 fields per second). Many that convert NTSC to PAL on the fly give jerky results, but often they can be changed to output native what went in.

[Rauli]

I worked out what was going wrong with the audio out of sync. The first prototypes of my dvd used mp2 audio which worked fine on all dvd players except the cheap DSE dvd player. I then went about trying to change the audio stream to ac3 (sorry got acc and ac3 mixed up earlier) ffmpeg seems to work but I don't trust it making compliant streams. I came across Audio DVD Creator which is a prog that makes pcm or ac3 dvds to play big collections of music on your dvd player. I am not sure if the ac3 encoder it uses is fully dvd compliant but I have decided to use this for now and it works perfectly on that cheap DSE brand dvd player, no out of sync audio. I used vobedit to split the video out of the vobs I have into .m2v and used .wav pcm from the original .wmv file I made the dvd videos from. I converted the sampling from 44.1khz to 48khz with Nero Wavedit using maximum quality settings. I encoded the dvd disc with these wavs with Audio DVD Creator and compiled them to a folder on the hard drive then I used Vobedit to split them vobs again into .ac3 and threw away the .m2v's. Tip - if using DVD Audio Creator to convert audio to .ac3 like I did, make one dvd at a time with one audio file at time. I did use bsweet at first to convert sampling but it made .wavs with a sharp tick at the start of the file and window's sound recorder created distorted sound wavs. Now free programs are criticised but when I tried to combine the .m2v and the .ac3 into a vob using tmpgenc dvd styler spat the dummy when trying to generate my dvd from these so instead I combined, or 'muxed' as is the term I believe with mplex.exe included in the dvd styler package.

I read in other forums even expensive dvd players have issues with mp2 so I suggest to all encode your dvd's with .ac3.

Where there is a will, there is a way . Thanks for participating on this topic.

Thanks,
Rauli

[guns1inger]

mp2 is part of the DVD specification for PAL. A lot of decoding amps don't support it, but you can configure your DVD player to output mp2 audio as PCM through the stereo outputs, so this isn't a major issue. Mant NTSC players also play mp2 audio quite happily, although older players may not like it.

That said, AC3 is universally accepted, and I only encode with AC3.

[Rauli]

I tried someones suggestion in this thread to encode the original .wmv 320x240 to a low resolution dvd, so i tried for 352x240 which meant all i had to do was add a border and no pixel resizing was needed. The result was bad , blocky blurs especially on objects with defined borders. My original technique turned out to be the best for exporting a low resolution video to dvd.

I would warn anyone wanting to make a low resolution dvd its just not worth it and think they should have eliminated this from the dvd specifications.

Thanks,
Rauli