How to analyze non-compliant audio

[frankvw]

I have a DVD which appears to be a private release (it's a German documentary with Dutch subtitles, no region or CSS as far as I can see) and I'm in the process of transferring all my DVDs to harddisk so that I can play them on a Rasperry Pi running Kodi.

When I play the DVD in my DVD player, I get background music on one channel (left) and the voiceover on the other (right). However when I copy the files to harddisk and play them (using VLC, Kodi, even Media Player) I don't get any voice-over, just the background music.

I tried to use Handbrake to convert the file to an MKV, including the Dutch subs) and the default audio codec there is AC3 (ffmpeg). I tried downmixing to stereo and mono, but no luck. I get either no voice-over or no sound at all.

Apparently there are come compliance issues here.

Incidentally, I've tried to use subrip to extract the Dutch subtitle track so I can translate it into English (my wife speaks neither German nor Dutch) but subrip won't even load any IFO or VOB files. Also, Kodi won't scrape the VIDEO_TS folder for this DVD. All indications of a non-compliant DVD.

How do I find out what the problem is? Is there something that will analyze this DVD (especially the audio track, but preferably everyting) and can provide some details as to what's going on?

Is this fixable?

// FvW