AC3 Delay reported by SmartRipper -What does it Mean?

[Jinxed]

Call me stupid if you like, but can someone help me out with this perplexity?

When I strip streams using Smartripper or any other demuxing tool (DVD2AVI for instance) the audio output file describes a delay in miliseconds, e.g. vts_01_([0x80]_Audio_English_AC3(6Ch)_48kHz___)_Delay_-40ms.ac3.

Can someone tell me what this -40ms means and how I synch my sound and video when I eventually re-author in Maestro?

Does the -40ms mean that the delay is actually negative, i.e. the audio is ahead of the video? If so, if I move the audio file to the right by 40ms on the timeline will this cure the very slight synchronisation error?

Appreciate any helpful responses.

[Matthew]

-40ms means the audio starts before the video. Which means you should drag it to the left. Unfortunately you can't do this.

If you drag to the right 40ms then the async will be even worse (the audio will start 80ms later than it should).

How I fix this is use AC3 delay corrector to cut off 2 frames (2 x 32 ms = 64 ms). This creates a file with delay +16. Drag the audio file to the right in Maestro by that much.

For more specifics read my post here:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20433

This is just my method, others say you should just rely on the timestamps in the AC3 (i.e. don't change AC3 position in Maestro).