Sound comming out only from one speaker

[numlock]

I captured a video tape and encoded it into MPEG-1 Layer 2 Stereo. I noticed that when I play the file on a computer the sound is comming only from the right speaker. ALso, if I play this DVD in a standalone player, the sound can be hardly heard even if I crank the volume to 100%. I tried to encode it as mono, but still no sound from the DVD player. It seems like there is only one channel. How can I fix this ?

TIA

[pacohaas]

this can happen with certain capture cards, please explain your process in a little more depth, what was the capture process...how did you try to encode to mono...etc. You should be on the right track here with the mono encoding idea ;) Let's just make sure you're doing it right.

[numlock]

Problem is, the tape itself seems to only have one channel, because when I play it in a VCR the sound is comming out only from one speaker, so I don't think this has anything to do with the capture card. Is there a way to 'artificially' add another identical channel so that I can encode it in stereo ?

[pacohaas]

Originally posted by numlock
Is there a way to 'artificially' add another identical channel so that I can encode it in stereo ? sure, you could duplicate it in a wave editor, but as I said before, you'd be better off just creating a mono wave file from the one good channel and encoding it as mono.

[Sakuya]

Why would it be good only in mono? Wouldn't it be better if you converted mono to stereo? I have the same problem. I just managed to have the stereo WAV (with the silent channel) reduced to mono in Audacity. But now I'm stick wondering if I should upgrade to stereo since mono is not as good right?

[KpeX]

If the original source is mono, it's pointless to duplicate this channel and waste twice the space with stereo. Since DVD supports mono streams, it's better to simply encode to a mono AC3/MP2 and author.