Help with audio formats

[blkntan]

Hello all,

I have a question regarding which audio format to use when authoring DVD's. I am editing home movies in Premiere 6.5 and using the Adobe MPEG encoder to encode the mpeg files. I prefer to set the audio to mpeg 2 rather than PCM because it results in meaningful smaller files since the audio is compressed. But I was reading this guide re: TMPGEnc and noticed that it said not all DVD players can handle mpeg audio.

Is this a big problem or is it just really old players that can't handle mpeg audio? I don't want to send these DVD's out to family and friends and have a bunch of them not able to play it. Would appreciate any input on this issue. Thanks in advance.

Blk`N`Tan

[groyal]

Hello all,
I prefer to set the audio to mpeg 2 rather than PCM because it results in meaningful smaller files since the audio is compressed. But I was reading this guide re: TMPGEnc and noticed that it said not all DVD players can handle mpeg audio.

There are two kinds of MPEG audio: MPEG-1 Layer 2 (the kind you're talking about) and MPEG-2 audio (the kind the site is talking about). There are some important differences between the two.

MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio is the format used for S/VCD. It has four encoding modes: single channel, dual channel, stereo and joint stereo. Virtually all DVD players can handle this format, so playback compatibility isn't a problem.

MPEG-2 audio has these modes plus two surround modes: 3/2 (L,C,R,Ls,Rs) and 5/2 (L,C,R,Lc,Rc,Ls,Rs). NV Philips developed the MPEG-2 audio standard with the expectation that it would be used instead of Dolby AC3 on PAL DVDs, but for some reason it never got usable encoders out the door so the standard was changed to allow AC3 on PAL DVDs instead. Once that happened, interest in the MPEG-2 audio format vaporized so DVD player support is spotty at best.

In real terms, since there are no generally available MPEG-2 audio encoders (and if there were, the first four modes would be downward-compatible with MPEG-2 layer 1) you don't have to worry about creating an audio stream that won't play.

However...

The DVD standard allows up to 8 simultaneous audio tracks, but at least one of those tracks must be PCM or AC3 format (NTSC). Additional tracks can be any desired format, but if you only need or want one audio track that's a bit of a problem. Some DVD authoring programs are very strict about the standard. If you don't give them a PCM or AC3 track they'll generate one by themselves. Others are more flexible, allowing you to break small rules so long as you honor the big ones.

But the bottom line is this: so long as you stick to mono or stereo and your authoring program lets you get away with it, neither MPEG-1 layer 2 nor MPEG-2 audio is going to cause you any trouble.