Audio cuts out when converting captures: why?

[tomreedtoon]

Here's the basics. My computer is a 1 gHz Athlon, with 512 megs memory and an ATI TV Wonder VE card. I'm using Win XP Pro and a hard drive formatted in NTFS. In an attempt to get fairly good captures from cable to convert to SVCD, with cleaner editing than those damned MPEG 2 compressed captures have allowed, I've been using VirtualDub for captures.

The capture is as clean as I can get it. I use the MJPEG codec to compress the video, at quality 19, as someone suggested. I capture the audio as PCM, 44.1 kHz mono, uncompressed. (After experimenting with audio compression, it's dangerous; most things can't read MP3 audio compression, the only good sounding thing VirtualDub has.)

I then edit the resulting file to remove commercials, and save it - again with MJPEG compression and uncompressed PCM audio.

Now, whether I use TMPGenc or BBmpeg to encode, only about the first minute or so of audio gets encoded. The rest of the stinking conversion file is silent!

I've found a crude way around it, which is to go back into VirtualDub and extract the audio into a WAV file. Then I go to TMPGenc and do the encoding, using the separate WAV file, and I get audio all the way through. Unfortunately, TMPGenc does lousy encoding, all blocky and jerky. (And I'm told if I paid for the newer versions of TMPGenc, it would be worse.) I don't see a way that BBmpeg can take a separate audio file and merge it with the video in a final MPG file for burning, which is a shame because its video rendering is a lot cleaner and smoother.

I don't see anything like dropped frames or problems when looking at the original AVI. And the audio does play all the way through on the original AVI, and the edited AVI.

Does anybody know what is wrong here, and what can be done about it? As satisfying as it might be to scream at the top of my lungs at the people who screwed up TMPGenc, I'd rather have the edited capture rendered perfectly the first time through BBmpeg.

[BJ_M]

well tmpgenc - any version -- can produce excellent results , in fact some of the best , so you may want to check your settings .

i always seperate audio and video anyway -- dont know about inputing seperate audio/video streams in BBmpeg if that what you want to use ..

[tomreedtoon]

Well, BJ_M, I've been using the settings that come with TMPGenc. I know other people have some...supposedly a guy at www.kvcd.net has some strange setting files that can put 2 hours on a single CD...but I want something standard that might actually play on a few real world DVD players. If you have to go in and mess with a bunch of nonstandard settings to get adequate results, the program is badly designed, or they should update their official setting files.

I have to disagree with your statement that "well tmpgenc - any version -- can produce excellent results , in fact some of the best ". Listen to the people that complain that they have to buy a DVD software player to get the codecs that the program designers left out, apparently under threat of death or something. There are dozens of posts here at VCDhelp claiming the new, crippled, no-codec versions are inferior to the earlier, freeware versions.

As for BBmpeg, I did find a recent guide here that offers a procedure for the use of DVD2SVCD, a kind of batch file deal that runs a whole bunch of programs, that supposedly can take an AVI file to a burnable MPG all by itself. Part of that process is BBmpeg. I've experimented with it, and so far I haven't gotten it to finish; something keeps crashing.

In the meantime, I'd like to know if anyone has had the same original audio problem I first reported; no audio from encoding an AVI file to SVCD MPG after the first minute or so of encoding.