Confused with TS Muxer & it's audio delay for DVD VOB's

[Gurd99]

I have been using this for backing up dvd's & it seems to work well, just open the vob's & join them up, keep what audio tracks you want & output TS.

When opening the vob's of one physical DVD, the audio delay was set to -79ms. Not sure why or what this means? When playing back & comparing the TS to the orig DVD, the lip sync seemed the same. DVD's seem to have different values when you open the vob.

I mounted an iso of a dvd from dvdshrink & when accessing the vobs with tsmuxer the audio is delayed by -300ms. EDIT: (even though that iso plays fine sync wise). I set it to zero & the audio sync is off badly.

Why does tsmuxer come up with these numbers? Should they be left alone or what?

Also, for Blu-ray audio tracks should it be left alone too?

thanks

[hech54]

VOB files are only meant to exist within the DVD structure (VIDEO_TS folder). Stop messing with VOB files.

[Gurd99]

VOB files are only meant to exist within the DVD structure (VIDEO_TS folder). Stop messing with VOB files.

What ever the hell that means. You don't explain at all. These play back what seem to be fine so shut it.

[hech54]

VOB files are only meant to exist within the DVD structure (VIDEO_TS folder). Stop messing with VOB files.

What ever the hell that means. You don't explain at all. These play back what seem to be fine so shut it.

OK...let's try this again:

Should they be left alone or what?

Yes...leave them alone. The file structure inside the VIDEO_TS folder is complex and each file relies on the file before and after it(not to mention the often corresponding BUP file) in order for the video on the DVD to play correctly and in the proper order....after all the source video used to create the DVD (during the "authoring" process) was one, large lump of MPEG2 video(with audio).....that lump of video obviously in no way resembled a group of VOB files....it was an MPEG2 file....and since you cannot just burn an MPEG2 video file to a blank DVD(without going through the authoring process) and expect it to be a playable DVD that you can pop into a set-top DVD player....stop worrying about/messing with VOB files.
Better?

[hello_hello]

If you disable DVDShrink's compression or set the default output size to something large so it won't try to shrink, you can use it's re-author function to backup individual episodes or just the movie etc as a set of vob files. There's also an option (either in preferences or the backup window) to tell DVDShrink not to split vobs into 1GB segments, so you'll end up with a single vob file for the movie or for each episode. I tend to re-author first before working with vob files so I know they only contain the required video (ie just the movie or a single episode) but maybe that's not always necessary.

Once I've re-authored, I've remuxed vobs as MKVs with MKVMergeGUI lots of times. MKVMergeGUI even has an "additional parts" function, primarily to use for appending sequential files such as vobs together while remuxing.
https://github.com/mbunkus/mkvtoolnix/wiki/Appending-files-vs.-adding-as-additional-parts
I can't see any reason why TSMuxer couldn't also append them while remuxing, assuming it knows they're just "split" (see the above link). There's also MakeMKV for ripping DVDs as MKVs, if you want another option.

As far as the audio delay goes, I'd probably rely on TSMuxer getting it right until proven otherwise. It's not unusual for DVD video to have some sort of audio delay. I'm not really sure why though. When you extract the audio from vobs with DGIndex it writes any audio delay to the extracted file. Something like:
"VTS_01_1 T80 1_0ch 192Kbps DELAY -79ms.ac3",
so you could try extracting with DGIndex to see if it agrees. It'll index and extract the audio from sequential vob files as a single file.

Some muxing programs might handle the delay in different ways. For instance MKVs can't have negative delays, so generally an appropriate amount is truncated from the beginning of the audio stream instead, then a small positive delay might be used to make up any difference. So if you remux the vobs using different programs and appear to end up with different audio delays as a result, don't panic.