MPEG Streamclip - remove excess audio tracks from Dreambox Video

[Tseb]

Hi -

I am a n00b here, and don't really know a lot about video conversion...

I have a Dreambox which I have recorded video to. It records in ts format. I can easily trim and convert this video to H264 mp4 (my preferred choice as my Samsung TV handles it well) on my mac, but I now have a problem.

I have downloaded several videos from a station that puts many audio tracks in different languages, and I want just English. I realise this is relatively easy to deal with, demux, remove unused languages and remux.

The problem is that the station in question to save space puts the languages in mono on a stereo track, English on the left channel, German on the right channel, and other tracks also in two languages (e.g., track two with Italian on left channel with Greek on right channel) with a total of about 20 languages.

Can anybody suggest any easy Mac way to just end up with a H264 in mp4 container with English in mono on both L&R channels?

Thank you in advance

Tseb.

[usually_quiet]

Hi -

I am a n00b here, and don't really know a lot about video conversion...

I have a Dreambox which I have recorded video to. It records in ts format. I can easily trim and convert this video to H264 mp4 (my preferred choice as my Samsung TV handles it well) on my mac, but I now have a problem.

I have downloaded several videos from a station that puts many audio tracks in different languages, and I want just English. I realise this is relatively easy to deal with, demux, remove unused languages and remux.

The problem is that the station in question to save space puts the languages in mono on a stereo track, English on the left channel, German on the right channel, and other tracks also in two languages (e.g., track two with Italian on left channel with Greek on right channel) with a total of about 20 languages.

Can anybody suggest any easy Mac way to just end up with a H264 in mp4 container with English in mono on both L&R channels?

Thank you in advance

Tseb.

I don't know of an easy way. If you can demux the audio and video with MPEG StreamClip, it looks like Audacity can be used to split the stereo channels into two mono chanels, and you can save the one you want to keep in its own file. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/onlinehelp-1.2/menu_track.htm Once you have the channel you want to keep, you will need to remultiplex it with the video that you demultiplexed earlier.

[Tseb]

Thank you VERY much usually_quiet for the reply. This helped enormously. All sorted now.

For the information of anybody else wanting to do this (and me maybe in a year or two when I have forgotten how...!) below is exactly how it works for me, using Audacity 2.0.2 and MPEG Streamclip 1.9.3b7 both FREE running on Mac 10.7.4 - the only thing that is necessary to pay for is the Apple MPEG-2 add-on if converting from a .ts file which I was doing from a Dreambox dm800se clone.


1. using MPEG Streamclip, open the .ts file, select and crop the parts you want as usual (remove ads etc).

2. Demux (bottom of the File menu) to m2v and aiff - this will give the audio and video files separate - quite a quick procedure. (note - don't use a long filename for this...)

3. Duplicate the audio file in the finder - quicker than doing it in Audacity! This is a "just in case"!

4. Using Audacity, open the AIFF file (choose 'read the files directly…')

5. to the left of the waveform display, click on the file name and select "split stereo to mono"

6. click the cross in the top left corner of the track that you don't want, to delete it, or change tracks in any other way you want. Remember to keep them exactly the same length otherwise it will all go out of sync...

7. export the file as AIFF (file - export)

8. ensure that the NEW aiff file has the same filename (except for the extension, obviously) as the current m2v file and is in the same folder

9. open the m2v file in MPEG Streamclip

10. Command control E to export to mp4 as normal. In the selection panel that comes up set audio to MONO - MPEG Streamclip will recognise the audio file as long as it has exactly the same filename and will remux and include it in the normal export to mp4.