feature request: mono sound

[EntAlex]

Hi,

there are a lot of old movies available on dvd which have mono sound.
And there will come much more in the future.
As I read in the forum u have to convert the sound manual to get a mono mp2 file. Wouldn't it be a nice feature to add mono to the audio tab? ;)

Alex

[UltimateDBZ]

Why would there be more mono movies in the future? o_O;

[markrb]

I have a feeling that years after this program has stopped being developed people will still be asking for things that really have no use beyond their needs.

As you already said you can do this manually if need be.

Mark

[manono]

Hi-

Why would there be more mono movies in the future?

That's easy. More and more classic movies are being released to DVD. For example, I believe that King Kong is being released to DVD later on this year. So you might come back with "Whoopy-do. Who wants to watch 70 year old movies?" And I might say that I'm pretty much disgusted with what passes for entertainment from Hollywood these days, and much prefer older classic movies and cutting edge movies from non-Hollywood and "foreign" directors.

As you already said you can do this manually if need be.

Sure, and you can do the whole SVCD conversion process manually. Keeping the audio as mono can free up a lot of bits which can go towards improving the video quality. Personally I don't think it's such an unreasonable request. Perhaps if enough people want the feature, dvd2svcd could look into it.

[dvd2svcd]

I'll look into it. I have a few other things I wanna finish first.

[manono]

Cool-I was researching this after I posted, and found that quite a few non-American movies from the '80s and '90s have been released with mono sound tracks. To give 2 examples, the John Woo-Chow Yun-Fat films The Killer (http://us.imdb.com/DVD?0097202) and Hard Boiled (http://us.imdb.com/DVD?0104684) have mono audio. These are great films by any standard (doesn't everyone like extreme violence? :)).

[chainsaw135]

Originally posted by manono
Cool-I was researching this after I posted, and found that quite a few non-American movies from the '80s and '90s have been released with mono sound tracks. To give 2 examples, the John Woo-Chow Yun-Fat films The Killer (http://us.imdb.com/DVD?0097202) and Hard Boiled (http://us.imdb.com/DVD?0104684) have mono audio. These are great films by any standard (doesn't everyone like extreme violence? :)).

I've seen "The Killer" a good movie, it kinda reminds me of some video games that have came out for pc's. What i mean is the action is awsome in this particular movie... "Hard Boiled" looks good but haven't seen that one.

[ux-3]

Many TV Series that are released these days have the non-english soundtracks in artificial stereo, i.e. 2x mono. Star Trek TNG is just one example. I remember asking for a way to do this some time ago. I also remember, that besweet was producing stereo, upon setting mono for input. Never figured it out, because I simply decided that it wasn't worth the time to actually do it manually.

[UltimateDBZ]

Originally posted by manono
Why would there be more mono movies in the future?

That's easy. More and more classic movies are being released to DVD. For example, I believe that King Kong is being released to DVD later on this year. So you might come back with "Whoopy-do. Who wants to watch 70 year old movies?" And I might say that I'm pretty much disgusted with what passes for entertainment from Hollywood these days, and much prefer older classic movies and cutting edge movies from non-Hollywood and "foreign" directors.That makes sense, I suppose. But I'm one of those guys that converts the new stuff for the most part. I haven't backed up a film older than about 5 years in quite some time.

It'd still be nice to have the feature so when the situation does arise, there'd be no trouble with it. But I don't know how reasonable it is, based on how much work it would entail, just for those rare situations...

[markrb]

All the mono movies I have seen are two channel mono so I can't see why encoding it with stereo settings will adversly effect it.

Mark

[wmansir]

I'm a big Kurosawa fan and only one of his movies on DVD ("Ran") isn't mono. I just encoded "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" and was surprised to find it was mono also.

I also use mono for commentary tracks on modern movies. At 64 or 48kbps a mono commentary sounds, well, not too good actually, but good enough for voice. Also note that Besweet doesn't support mono audio (at least the last time I checked) so you have to use Azid->toolame or perhaps HeadAc3he.

Joint Stereo has a really bad rap in regards to MP2 so I'm not sure if it would be better to encode a mono track as mono or just use joint stereo.

[EntAlex]

@markrb

you end up with a smaller audio track. So you can have more bitrate for the picture.

Alex

[ux-3]

Originally posted by wmansir
Joint Stereo has a really bad rap in regards to MP2 so I'm not sure if it would be better to encode a mono track as mono or just use joint stereo.

Tested this with TNG and derived at the obvious conclusion that stereo was the best setting.

[DSPguru]

Originally posted by wmansir
Also note that BeSweet doesn't support mono audio (at least the last time I checked).i've added support for mono mp2/mp3 encoding in beta12 (http://DSPguru.doom9.org/beta.html).