AC3 from MPEG2

[halek2]

Recently my daughter asked me to convert some of her old VHS tapes to DVD. Since hi quality was not a primary consideration I bought an AVERMedia EZDVD PCI card that includes NeoDVD software.

For tapes less than 2hrs the system works OK, but at 2 hours I either have to lower the Video quality or convert the audio to AC3. I have a copy of DVDit PE that I often use for generating DVDs from my DV camcorder. DVDit includes a AC3 encoder and I normally use that on my own DVDs.

Now my question. Since the Avermedia will only generate MPEG2 with PCM, is there a way to use DVDit to generate AC3 files from the MPEG2 files? I can't use them directly in DVDit because I get a message about improper GOP headers.

Thanks for any help!

[Mtz]

Nero Vision Express 2 make DVD's with AC3.

[echo]

Well, instead of encoding to ac3 you could extract the PCM file from the MPEG2 stream - I think it can be done with virtualdub(mod) - and encode it to mp2 using besweet. mp2 can be used on DVD's as well as ac3 IIRC and you could get pretty good quality at 192kbps...

regards
echo

[halek2]

One of the options during encoding was to use mpeg audio. When I tried it I could get audio when playing on my computer (PowerDVD) but my settop was silent.

AverMedia said that this is because mpeg audio was not supported. Did I get lead astraY? :confused:

[echo]

Well, I live in Europe and mp2 is included in the DVD specifications here, but I think it is not included in the NTSC DVD specifications. Although I think that most players in the states support it anyway. So maybe you were not lucky with yours. :(

regards
echo