synch issues with TMPGEnc DVD Author

[Tekka]

Hi,
I am just starting to learn how to make my own video DVDs, only I've hit a snag, I purchased a copy of TMPGEnc DVD Author after I found the Ulead DVD MovieFactory I got with my a06 very limited, and well I've been using TMPGEnc encoder for about 20 months now so I thought I would be safe.

Now to the problem. I made some DVDs with some MPEG1 source files I had, they played fine for about 10 or 15mins into each track and then they started to progressively loss synch. By the time the track ended at 45mins it was out by around 5seconds. Now the source files play perfectly when burnt as VCDs, so I assumed I must of been doing something wrong.

I hit google and found a number of instances similar to myself all using the same software, only I couldn't find a resolution, only some vague mention of separating the audio and video, re-encoding the audio and setting TDA to use that audio.

I would really appreciate any advice anyone could offer.

[Happygolucky]

You can set TMPGEnc encoder to produce two files, one for the video component, the other for the audio component. This can be done either manually (choosing ES (video+audio)) or via the wizard. Then you can choose the two files in TMPGEnc DVD Author. I've never had any sync issues using either software, though I always encode my audio to AC3 format using BeSweet.

[Tekka]

I'm not really sure what you mean, I can see how to do it, I had to "Simple Multiplex" it in order to be able to get it to read the MPEG file (odd I don't know why it wouldn't open it) and now I'm trying to work out if I just run encode on audio only or do I change the sampling rate from 44100 to 48000 (I read that might be the reason for the synch problem, TDA was stuffing something up when it re-encoded the audio)?

I'm not really keen on throwing away more DVD-Rs, they cost a mint.

[Tekka]

After much frustrating and painful bulldung, I've worked out that its the audio being 44100 rather then 48000 causing the issues when any program resamples it!!! I know next to nothing about how it works, and I honestly don't care. I tried with TMPGEnc to resample it to 48000 and then combine the file back up to test, but oh no, its out by a country mile.

I've looked and looked and looked for an answer online but all I can see is overly complex and annoying ways of fixing something that should be built into the expensive piece of software I paid for.

Hell I even tried this: http://www.afterdawn.com/articles/archive/vcd_to_dvd-r.cfm?wide=true five times but kept getting "illegal audio stream".

Sorry for venting, but I'm just so pissed off. Has anyone ever managed in history to burn a good DVD with MPEG1s that aren't forked up?

[DonBerg]

The simple answer is DVDs require 48Khz audio. You are trying to create a non-standard DVD with 44Khz audio, thats the problem. Its very easy with free software tools (like BeSweet) to convert a 44Khz audio file to 48Khz before authoring a DVD. It would be great if one software package did everything automatically for every application, but thats unfortunately not the case. For something like that I would have tested carefully with re-writeable DVDs first.

[Tekka]

Its very easy with free software tools (like BeSweet) to convert a 44Khz audio file to 48Khz

Yep sure is, pity getting the audio to sync back up is damn near impossible...

[Happygolucky]

Originally posted by Tekka
Yep sure is, pity getting the audio to sync back up is damn near impossible...

TMPGEnc has two resampling modes. Go to the Environmental Settings/Audio Engine. At the bottom you can choose Low Quality or High Quality or an external program. I used to have an external program do my resampling (SCMPX.EXE is a freeware converter that is exceptional in quality but very very slow). TMPGEnc added the high quality conversion a while back and it seems to work very well now so I use it if necessary.

But again, for my DVDs now I tend to use BeSweet to produce AC3 files for the audio, as that seems to be the most compatible with all hardware.