Video/audio freezing on commentary track

[surreal120]

I recently tried authoring a dvd in scenarist following trilight's guide with everything kept like the original, except the french audio track was replaced with dummy audio and the director's commentary was re-encoded from 192kbps to 128kbps. Everything work's fine in my standalone player until I turn on the commentary track: when I return to the movie it plays for about one frame and then freezes up (it doesn't lock out - I can still go back to the menu or pick another chapter - but the movie won't play until the english audio is turned back on). This problem does not occur when playing back on my computer.

As this was my first time ever trying to manually reauthor a DVD in scenarist, as well as my first time trying to re-encode audio, I'm wondering if I may have screwed something up. I didn't change any of the default settings in scenarist (except to set all data to drop frame) and got no unusual warnings and no errors. Is there something special you have to change - like in the ifo file? - when the audio bitrate is modified? Does "copy audio and subpicture tables" have to be turned on in IfoUpdate? Sorry I don't have my log files saved, but I was hoping someone might have run into this before. Thanks for any insights.

[oddyseus]

Hey surreal, I haven't come up anything like this but I suspect the 128 audio bitrate to be the problem. I have yet to see an audiotrack falling below 192kbs. Have u tried again with the orginal audio at 192?

[surreal120]

I haven't tried again with 192 - but since the track was 192 originally, that wouldn't solve the problem of fitting everything onto a DVD-5. I have however been able to get everything working using scenarist with the big3 for other movies - this was just the first time I didn't use reauthorist to generate the scenarist scripts (and the first time I tried re-encoding the audio). Anyway, I guess my point is that trying it again with 192 my not tell me anything in this case.

But to follow on what you suggested, I guess the big question would be: Has anyone gotten a DVD working with under 192kbps audio?

[oddyseus]

If it can mux OK with 192 audio, it tells u that u should compress the main movie some more.

[auenf]

Originally posted by oddyseus
Hey surreal, I haven't come up anything like this but I suspect the 128 audio bitrate to be the problem. I have yet to see an audiotrack falling below 192kbs. Have u tried again with the orginal audio at 192?

the 'optimum' bitrate for 2ch is 192kbps, for 1ch (C only) i think its like 96kbps

Enf...

[surreal120]

Odysseus, maybe I'm not explaining it right. I was trying not to compress the main movie, but to compress the audio instead. In this case, since it is only director's commentary, I don't mind sacrificing some audio quality in order to keep the video (and main audio) at its original bitrate.

But, maybe this is not possible with DVDs - i.e., maybe 192 is as low as you can go for 2 channel audio?

[oddyseus]

yes! I do believe that this is the bottom line :)

[auenf]

192 is the bottom line for 2ch before you lose frequency, however you can go down a little more, not sure how far tho.

Enf...