Dolby 5.1 is bloody crappy!

[flaninacupboard]

i asked this a while ago, but no-on aswered then. i have thus far ripped three DVD's, and created about ten VCD's from mpeg files off morpheus. my off the internet discs work great, and on the one or two i replaced the audio are spot on, as is one DVD rip: the crow, which is on standard 2Channel stereo. however, High fidelity and The League of gentlemen bth came out wrong. the speech channel seems to be distorted. voices have a harsh ringing tone, and volume of music effects and voices is all very low. i know its not the burn process, used the same all the time. its not tmpeg, used all the time, not the 48k to 41k conversion, i had to do this for a few mpegs, and the crow, and they're fine. therfore it's either dvd2avi or smartripper. so, um, help!

[adam]

Well I don't see what this has to do with Dolby or 5.1 but anyway...

TMPGenc is a horrible audio encoder. You will often get lots of artifacts with it. Maybe this explains the distortion you mentioned. As far as the ringing tone, this is caused by TMPGeng's frequency converter when you convert from 48kHz to 44100 kHz. If you have a recent version of TMPGenc then get toolame.exe and use it as an external encoder in TMPGenc. (options/environmental settings/external tool/layer 2)

If your going to convert from 48 to 44100 kHz then either just use dvd2avi to do it or get an external frequency encoder and use it from within TMPGenc...its below the external audio tool setting. I use ssrc.exe to do my frequency conversion.

If you dont normalize your audio then everything will be too soft or you will get very loud music and very soft voices, of course there are always exceptions with some movies. The normalize function in dvd2avi works fine, otherwise get a separate normalizer or do it in TMPGenc during encoding. If the total volume is still too low just use the audio effect option in TMPGenc to boost total volume, although if your source is dvd you really shouldnt have to ever do this.

In the future if you run into a problem and arent sure which prog caused it....CHECK! If you think its smartripper then after ripping play the vobs in a software dvd player. Sound ok? then its not smartripper. Think dvd2avi might have caused the bad audio? play the wav file it creates and see.

[Kdiddy]

Again I to most ask...what "bloody" hell does this have to do with Dolby 5.1??

[flaninacupboard]

no, it's not the 48K to 44k convertor. the crow was in 48k stereo, converted to 44k stereo in tmpeg. it is perfect. as were one or two of the mpegs off the net in 48k, converted to 44k fine. it's only surround sound mixes that malfunction, hence "bloody" dolby 5.1

[Kdiddy]

well A) TMPG has crappy audi conversion so dont use it...

Since you say its 5.1 one, I'll assume that means at some point you have a .ac3 file correct??...if so, download AZID, use this app to convert the ac3 to a .wav file, then download TOOLAME plug-in for TMPG, and convert that .wav file to 44.1 khz .mp2 file through use of this plug-in...example of this can be found at http://www.doom9.org...this is the only way I recommend to properly downmix a 5.1 .ac3 file into .mp2.

[adam]

Few dvds these days have a 2.0 mix, which means that just about any dvdrip you have, downloaded or otherwise, is going to contain surround sound downmixed to stereo. The source does not matter, it all ends up being stereo before it gets to the audio encoder. If you use TMPGenc to change the frequency from 48kHz to 44100kHz you will often get a horrible tinny sound. No not every time but very frequenty.

Don't use TMPGenc for audio, simple as that.