I have a mpeg file (it's actually a .dat file) which is encoded with the following specs:
Audio:
8-BIT Mono 41000Hz
Video:
352*240 pixels
NTSC at 29.97fps
As you can tell the quality is not that great. Is there any way I can convert the audio into 16-bit stereo (or dolby sarround) and improve the video in terms of clarity?
I have tried loading the file in flaskmpeg and converting to my specifications but I don't notice any difference in the output file. The same thing happens using Virtualdub.
Perhaps I'm doing something wrong. So, my questions are:
1. Can I improve the audio quality?
2. Can I improve the vide quality?
Thanks in advance.
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no sorry to tell you, unless you know someone who can turn water into wine.
If the file is blocky you can smooth it off but all your really doing is blurring it and losing detail in the process.
And unless you are a sound engineer making a mono soundtrack Stereo or Dolby Surround is pretty much no possible.
There might be some programs that do it but i havn't saw any.
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oozle,
you could resample the sound to 16-bit stereo or something like that, but just doing that will not improve the actual quality. The audio you have has only one channel, and converting it to stereo will only produce two copies of the same channel (i.e. L and R will be the same - copies of the mono source that you have). You could use some sound editing software to try and create two different channels from the mono, using effects & EQ etc.. but you're not going to get brilliant results from an 8-bit mono source.
The only way you could get significantly better audio is to go back to the source; where is your .dat file from? - is it ripped or downloaded etc..? I presume if it's a movie, then the original movie had good quality stereo sound. You may need to rip again, or capture the audio from the source some other way & multiplex it back in perhaps?
In short, by making the audio 8-bit mono, a lot of data has been lost. You can't get this data back (and therefore improve the quality) just by resampling to a higher bitrate, or converting to stereo etc..
In terms of the video, it's a similar story. What you've written doesn't sound too bad in itself (I think it's roughly the standard for NTSC format VCD). You might be able to make it look better (it's subjective) by re-encoding with something like TMPGEnc, VirtualDub or Flask etc.. in terms of making the images look smoother or more to your taste with filters etc.. but you can't get back the data that has been lost in encoding the video at that resolution and framerate.
So - either go back to the source and get a better copy (tell us how you got the .dat if you want advice from anyone about how to get a better copy) or you could try re-encoding with some filters etc.. to make the video more to your taste, but you're not going to improve the quality.
Not wishing to be rude - but have you ever heard the saying "you can't polish a turd"!!?
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Martyn - you beat me to it!
Water to wine is probably a more polite way to put it!! -
In that case is there any way to 'clean' the audio so as to get rid of the crackling sound?
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You can try and use an audio editor to clean out some of the crackling (like cool edit for example)--sometimes you get lucky and with a little tweaking you can clean up an audio file--but usually garbage in=garbage out. Good luck!
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You might be able to split the sound out (probably into a .wav file), and run it through an editor like Soundforge or GoldWave and clean it up a bit.
Not 100% sure what settings you'd use unless you want to go through manually removing each crackle & pop, but you might be able to improve it a bit - soundforge has got a 'smooth' filter or something like that I think.
Then save the cleaned-up .wav and multiplex it back in with the video.
(There are probably several ways to demultiplex / remultiplex, but TMPGEnc springs to mind. There are probably also a lot of other sound editors - the two I've mentioned are not freeware. Have alook around.. you might find something good at http://www.doom9.org/software2.htm#audio EDIT: had a look there & can't see a freeware editor, just encoders etc.. Try zdnet / google etc.. I'll post again if I find one that looks okay)
Hope that helps. -
If you need an audio editor, have a look at:
http://www.webattack.com/Freeware/gmm/fwaudioedit.shtml
There seem to be a few free ones there - you might find something that does what you're after - it says that "Audacity" has a noise reduction filter.. but I can't vouch for how good any of these ones will be. A lot of the editors like goldwave / soundforge / cool edit are not cheap, so I don't know how a good a free app is going to be.
Good luck - let us know how you get on.
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