Sound: 48 vs. 44.1 ?

[bspmail]

I'm making MPEG2's for SVCD's and I hope to have a DVD burner someday so I'm also making MPEG2's at a higher bit rate for DVD's and saving them.

As I understand it the SVCD standard doesn't support sound at 48 Khz but if I just capture my videos in 44.1 Khz is there a noticible difference between 44.1 Khz and 48 Khz on DVD sound? or am I better off capturing at 48Khz and using ssrc when I encode in TMPGEnc for my SVCD's?

Just curious if anyone has had any experience with this.

[Ookami]

Quality is relative.

Altough I may seem of no help, I would recommend you to try it for yourself...

My standpoint:

If you convert from DVD, downsampling with SSRC, will give you excellent quality and you are sure that you don't break the specifications with the audio.

BTW, what do you mean by capture? If you are encoding from a DVD, you probably convert the digital way (decrypter etc.) not analog (TV-in etc.)?!

If you convert your TV captures, you should capture the audio at 44.1 kHz anyway.

Cheers,

Mijo.

[WarpEnterprises]

IMHO, the audible difference is extremly small and will be covered by many other factors (e.g. which encoder).
You can also take into account that many (is not most) DVD-player will play 48khz-"SVCD", so if the SVCDs are for nown users (verified to have compatible players) you can make them with 48khz and you won't need to transcode the audio when going to DVD.

[bspmail]

Thanks for your help.

As I understood it the SVCD standard was 44.1 Khz, is that correct?

I'm capturing from VHS tapes to make my SVCD/DVD MPEG2's. I'll probably give it a try and see if my player can handle the SVCD's at 48 Khz but to make sure any SVCD player can handle it it sounds like I might want to stick with 44.1 Khz if that is the standard for SVCD's?

I just started messing around with toolame and ssrc and I noticed that when I captured the video at 48 Khz and used those tools during the encode process the final result had some occasional "cracks" and "pops" in the sound that I don't seem to remember when I was capturing at 44.1 Khz without toolame and ssrc.

I kind of figured that the difference was probably too small to notice but thought I'd ask anyway. Thanks again for your help.

[ronnylov]

I have recently bought a DVD burner and found that it's not that easy to convert SVCD to DVD. The SVCD standard resolution 480x576 (PAL) or 480x480 (NTSC) is not a valid DVD resolution. Yes it is possible to make tricks to fool the authoring program so it is possible to create non standard DVD with SVCD resolution but it will not play correctly on all players. My standalone player (Nintaus N-9901) can play SVCD without any problems but if I try to play a DVD with SVCD resolution then the aspect ratio is totally wrong, the picture is squiched with black borders on the left and the right side.

Another thing is that you must have 48 kHz sampling frequency on the audio when creating a DVD. The DVD authoring programs won't accept 44.1 kHz audio.

What worked well for me was to convert those non-standard SVCD-discs I have made with 352x576 resolution (PAL) and 48 kHz audio. Then all I had to do was to remux the file before importing it into the DVD authoring program (I use SpruceUp). So if you want to make discs that easily can be converted to DVD then I recomend 352x576 (PAL) or 352x480 (NTSC) XSVCD with 48 kHz audio.

Ronny

[WarpEnterprises]

I didn't want to propose more "x" SVCD, but yes, Me to is using 352-resolution quite often. None of my friends DVD-player doesn't play it and when the source is NOT DVD or you aim for low bitrate thats ideal.
Try it, bspmail.
(don't care too much about the "standard" SVCD, e.g. I have a toshiba-210, it plays quite a broad spectrum of non-standard but does not play standard SVCD with correct sync.
And the bottom line is to encode in such a way that you don't need to RE-Encode

[adam]

352x480/576 is not non-standard. This resolution complies with the CVD standard which is basically backward compatible with the SVCD format. If you use this resolution your resulting disk will still play on any SVCD compatible dvd player.

Just to clarify, the CVD standard and the SVCD standard are virtually identical except for the resolution difference. Besides that the only difference is in the names of certain files and such, which basically will not affect hardware playback.

If you current dvd player supports 48kHz audio in a SVCD or CVD than you might as well use it if you know that you will eventually convert your existing movies onto dvd-r/w.

Using 48kHz audio in a CVD, well non-standard CVD, you can later re-author as a DVD without any further transcoding. All you need to do is remultiplex and you have a fully dvd compliant mpg.

[anders@dac.se]

if you use scenarist for DVD authoring you're not forced to use 48khz sound, you can use 38khz or 44.1 but whats important is that you use the same freq. in the entire DVD project.. otehrwise you cant export it to an DVD image..

/A

[Herske]

IIRC, Lame is tuned for 44.1 kHz.

>is there a noticible difference between 44.1 Khz and 48 Khz on DVD sound?

No one can answer this question for you except yourself. There is a simple way to know for sure: ABX both wavs. www.pcabx.com