Wanna re-author DVDs to 2.0/2.1 stereo since most of them only got 5.1

[rock_king_my]

Hi folks.

I want to re-author DVDs to 2.0 or 2.1 stereo since most of them only got 5.1 stereo.

I want to do this for the purpose of squeezing 2 or more movies on 1 disc. It's smaller in size & I don't have a home theatre system to enjoy 5.1 anyway, just a 29" Flat screen TV!

I don’t think this can be done in PGCEDIT or VOBBLANKER.

Will this be easy? Hopefully, the result will NOT be out-of-synch.

I know most people in this section of the forum ask how to do the reverse i.e. 2.0 to 5.1.

An online guide would be great but I haven’t spotted one for converting 5.1 DVD movies to 2.0 or 2.1 DVD movies!

I don’t want to do a DVD-RIP them to MPEG2 (.mpg) files as I would lose the subtitles.

CHEERS!

[scharfis_brain]

recoding 5.1 audio to 2.0 won't gain a siginficant bitrate increase to the video.

[rock_king_my]

recoding 5.1 audio to 2.0 won't gain a siginficant bitrate increase to the video.

Hi

Not much difference even for a 29" TV, eh?

What about doing 3-in-1s or 4-in-1s DVDs? Would a decrease in audio channels be useful?

I read somewhere you can put up to 300 mins worth of movies on a SINGLE LAYER DISC if you use 2.0 stereo & still get a reasonable picture quality output.

It should be ok for a bunch of feature length cartoons, right? Also wanna do this for non-animated normal movies!

CHEERS!

[scharfis_brain]

example:the 5.1 Sound commonly is encoded at 448 or 384 kbps. A reasonable bitrate for 2.0 sound is 192 kbps.

So all you'll win is 192 to 256 kbps to spend to the video. This is not much.

If you want to go for 300 minutes per DVD-R you'll end up in a overall average bitrate of 2000 kbps.
this means you'll only win about 10 to 15% of video data rate if you transcode the audio from 5.1 to 2.0.

Anyways. I wouldn't squeeze such an amount of video on one DVD-R. Quality will be not satisfying anymore.
The bitrate will be lower than SVCD while resolution is bigger.
This will be horror for MPEG.

[check]

If you have some DVD-RWs it's worth trying to see how it comes out. To convert 5.1 ac3 to 2.0 mp2 you can use the free tool MeGUI (it's a complete video re-encoding solution, but has an audio encoding part) or one of the many ac3 encoders around.