AC3 with DVD Lab Pro less than a whisper on my TV

[drinklime]

I have tried several AC3 encoders (free and commercial) and no matter what when I burn this DVD in DVD Lab Pro 1.5 my standalone player is playing the audio at a super super super low volume. I set the TV volume to max and press my ear against the speaker and then I can barely hear it. I thought the problem was the encoder but I even tried Soft Encode and get the same result. I am out of ideas, the only constant is DVD Lab Pro. Some FAQ said to change the DVD player setup but I tried setting the DVD player Dolby setting to bitstream and PCM and both had the same result. The audio is fine in PowerDVD (although I get all kinds of errors in Theatertek...)

Any ideas?

PS this is just 2 channel audio... PCM would take up too much space and I'm nervous to use mp2 for NTSC

[guns1inger]

You need to either up the volume before you encode to AC3, or make sure you have your AC3 settings correct when encoding. I use Sound Forge to encode to AC3 and author with DLP and have no issues at all. Granted, I play back through a decoding amplifier, however I have my home made discs playing at the same volume as my commercial discs.

[Soopafresh]

Been working on a series of really simple scripts which will increase volume and perform dynamic range limiting on the major audio file types for video - AC3, MP3, WAV, DTS, MP2, etc. Requires Avisynth be installed (no biggie, that's a really small app) and .NET 2.0. It'll be really simple 2-track stereo AC3 for your DVD, but it'll have some volume. What format is your audio before you turn it into AC3 ?

Then again, your AC3 shouldn't be so quiet that you have to hold your ear to the TV

[drinklime]

The audio is WAV files from the AVI's I recorded. The wavs are loud on my computer, and all of the AC3's I created sound a little softer on my computer, but on my TV through my DVD player they are inaudible. The player is a Panasonic S29. I have to be doing something wrong somewhere. When I play them in PowerDVD everything sounds normal.

[drinklime]

ROFL. I found the problem. My DVD player audio was hooked up to the wrong input on my TV. LOL. I guess I learned that the audio from another input actually leaks over. Oh well, problem solved.