Demuxing two audio streams?

[cogd115]

I recently encoded Princess Mononoke. I usually keep the original language audio, in this case Japanese, when it comes to foreign movies. But, I found that the English dub was excellent, which is rare. I am trying to keep both audio streams. Is it possible to keep both in one encoding or without having to make a movie for each audio? When I tried to put the English dub version as a secondary audio stream, both audio streams were played in playback. And I could not figure out how to keep the audio separate.

Hmm.. I am giving the English version to my niece and the Japanese version for myself. So, I might as well make both... :) Still, two audio streams for one movie sounds nice...

[smiller667]

Just out of curiosity - which was your target format? DVD, SVCD, AVI?

[jggimi]

You can have 2 audio streams in a single .avi file, but you need either a player that can support multiple streams such as BSPlayer or ZoomPlayer, or you need the Morgan Stream Switcher.

From an ease of use perspective, I recommend the former, rather than the latter.

[Hiro2k]

You might also try using some of the newer container formats such as OGM and MKV if you want more than 1 audio stream. Avi can do it, but you have a very large overhead and are confined to either MP3 or AC3 audio.

You can also have soft subs muxed into either container. I prefer doing all my anime in OGM since I always have more than 1 language to keep. The other benifit of OGM and MKV is that they have a much lower overhead for each audio stream, so you can save more bits for you main movie.

I'm assuming your using MP3 as your audio, but with OGM and MKV you can use other audio formats(AAC, OGG, AC3) which IMO sound much niceer than MP3 at low bitrates and they all have a lower overhead. Even MP3 in OGM and MKV has a much lower overhead.

Now to Demux your streams, you can use Vdubmod. Go to the streams tab and then tell it to demux your two audio streams.

[manono]

cogd115-

Lemme guess-Windows Media Player. Didn't I warn you about that player before? Take jggimi's advice and use a real player (no, not RealPlayer :)).

You can encode with the 2 audio tracks, and before giving to your niece, remove the Japanese track as Hiro2k instructed.

[cogd115]

Somebody, please, get Manono off my back! :D Yeah, I was playing it on both windows media player and windvd4 which I am rapidly realizing are crappy -- well at least for xvid...

Now, I put the two aduio streams and played the whole movie in the BS player. Tic toc, the audio tracks are being manhandled. I wish I knew it before I encoded other animes with better than average English voice acting like Ghost In the Shell (hmm, I could say the same thing about svcd to which I don't plan to go back). Yum.. Thanks, manono and jggimi. :)

Hiro, I am not aware of too many things as the song goes. :o When you are speaking of "lower overhead," about how much are you speaking of? And you mentioned that it would sound better at low bitrates than mp3. Could you amplify on "low bitrates?" For instance, I usually make two cd encodings for anime movies running from 70 minutes to 120 minutes. I went overkill for Princess Mononoke for three cds. How much of benefit in terms of bites given the same quality do you think I may be able to get? (I am sure it will take another month or so for me to learn the minimum knowledge about the OGM and MKV. I won't let you waste my time, so I am gonna extract every bit of info you may withhold before I tip my toe into the new water. :D Kidding!) Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, you make it sound rather interesting. Would ya like some cogd repellent? :)

[cogd115]

Oh, one more thing. I have abandoned qpel unless the source dvd is brightly shot, of higher resolution, well defined overall, etc. I was going through a few disney and anime stuffs I encoded with qpel on and found that the "qpel effects" are not prominent. For animations, do you guys find qpel useful without some adverse effects that behave quite eradically? To me, qpel is naughty. But.. It kinda behaves with animations I encoded so far.. Your insight on it??

[Hiro2k]

Here is an example of overhead for Matroska.
http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~noe/Video-Zeug/AVIMux%20GUI/en_overhead_comparison.html

Please note that only the first movie has an MP3 stream, and the other 3 are all AC3 tracks.

To calculate your overhead with OGM you can try Koepi's tool
http://www.roeder.goe.net/~koepi/misc.html

[cogd115]

Thanks for the links, Hiro. It is somewhat hard for me to make total sense out of the chart. But I will come around -- hopefully :D .