Sound disappears

[Karovaldas]

I've had this happen on a couple of occasions:

I use CCE to make an MPEG-2 video file and create the MP2 audio with toolame. There is a difference in duration by 6 frames. Both components work fine, though.

I mux them together using bbMPEG. Neither VCDEasy nor Nero detect any problems with the files, but the sound vanishes about 3/4 of the way throug the movie. I mean, the sound is fine for the first 3/4 and then it just disappears!

Any ideas what may be going on?

[Bubba]

Hi Karovaldas,

I need to know a little bit more info:

1. Are your source (both Audio & Video) from a DVD, or from an AVI?
2. When you said "Both components work fine", I assumed that the audio track by itself has audio all the way through. Am I correct?

The reason for question #1, is that I have experienced in the past that I downloaded some AVI from the net, and tried to convert to VCD/SVCD so I can watch on my DVD player, I experienced the same thing as you described. In my case is that when demux the audio track & video tracks, sometimes I did not get all the complete tracks. I usually have to use VirtualDub to frameserve it to TMPGEnc to do re-encode to VCD/SVCD.

If your source is from a DVD that you rip, it means you should have 2 complete tracks, then it should be the muxing problem. Maybe you can try TMPGEnc mpeg tools to remux the track to see if it can help.

Hope this help.

Cheers,

[Karovaldas]

Hi Bubba,

Thanks for your input. Here are the answers to your questions as well as more detail

1. I don't have it on me, but I believe my source was a DivX-3 AVI. It is DivX for sure.

2. Yes, I did mean to say that the audio file by itself works just fine.

Here are some more details.
Video: I used AviSynth to feed the original file to CCE 2.67. One trouble here is that I could not find a way to make CCE encode with SVCD packet size. It can only go up to 2048 which is the DVD spec. I believe SVCD takes something over 2300.

Audio: I used Adobe's Audition to extract the .wav which was mono 32 kbps. I then reincoded it to stereo 64 Kpbs with TMPEG encoder using the toolame plug-in (elementary stream, audio only).

Any ideas?

[schofy12]

Sound Dissappears

The same thing has been happening to me. The only difference with my files is that the sound always disappears within the first five minutes of the movie.

I was in the process of converting DVD to XSVCD. The process I used was basically the same process that is used in DVD2SVCD. I ripped the DVD VOB's to my HD, created my .D2V file and demuxed the AC3 file at the same time using DVD2AVI, then I made an .AVS script and loaded it into my TMPGEnc to encode to create my .M2V file. When that was done I loaded the demuxed AC3 file into BeSweet and created my .MP2 file using the "MP2 for SVCD" profile. Then I ran bbMPEG and loaded the .M2V and .MP2 files to mux and cut. In the general settings tab I put 2 for the start second and 99999999 for the end seconds and 795 MB in the MAX MB. I, of course, choose the SVCD stream settings to make the final streams compliant to the SVCD standard. I didn't make any other adjustments just so I would be sure everything was standard.
The process always completed successfullly but the audio in the first final .MPG ALWAYS cut off after about 30 to 60 seconds into the movie. And the second final .MPG file (part 2) didn't have any audio at all. The remaining final .MPG files didn't have any audio either.

After the fist time this happened a while ago, I stopped creating the .MP2 files from the AC3 file using BeSweet. Instead, because I knew it would work, I decoded the Audio into .WAV's using the DVD2AVI process. Then I loaded the .WAV's into TMPGEnc with either the .AVS file or .D2V project file to create the standard SVCD .MPG files to burn.

But the audio sux ass in TMPGEnc so I wanted to go back to using an external audio app and mux and cut it with the .M2V file later. So when it happened again, I realized it wasn't a one time thing.
Then I tried to mux using TSCV, and it happened again. So, it wasn't just bbMPEG. So now there are just too many possibilities to try them all to fix the problem, so I figured I'd see if anyone else had this problem.

[Karovaldas]

Scofy,

You know you can use TOOLAME as an external MP2 audio encoder in TMPEGEnc? ... along with Lame for MP3's.

As for the disappearing sound ... no light at the end of the tunnel yet :(

Please help!!!

[schofy12]

Yeah I knew that, and I'll probably try that the next time but for right now, I have an .M2V file that's about 1550 MB, the original AC3 file, and another .MP2 file I just finished encoding to try to Mplex again. I wish i could just re-encode in TMPGEnc with tooLAME for the audio but I already have the video file and it's perfect. All I need to do is mux the damn files together and I'd be done.

P.S. I muxed the original AC3 file with my .M2V file using bbMPEG and it came out fine. The audio played in all the final files fine. But for some reason, my .MP2 files cut off sound shortly after it starts. So I figure maybe it's the .MP2 files that I made that were causing the cut off. They play fine on their own all the way thru but not when I mux them. This is starting to really piss me off becasue it's not like I just started backing up DVD's and making SVCD's, XSVCD's etc. This is the first major problem I've had in a long time.

[Karovaldas]

It sure is annoying ... and it looks like we're the only people with this issue.

So I issue another cry :eek: for help from the community!!!

[schofy12]

Success!!!
Instead of creating my .MP2 file from converting the AC3 in 1 step under the BeSweet Tab in BeSweet, I did each step separately. I'll explain:
To convert Ac3 to MP2 under the main Besweet tab in BeSweet in one step, the AC3 file is decoded and downmixed using the Azid.dll. Then the info gets encoded into MP2 using the tooLAME.dll. There is no WAV file using this method because it is all in one step so I decided to decode the AC3 file into a WAV file under the Azid tab in BeSweet and then put that WAV to the 2LAME tab and encode it to MP2 using the tooLAME.exe instead of the tooLAME.dll. I wanted to use the .exe's in separate steps so I could pin point a problem that may have been occuring. So I got the latest Azid and tooLAME .exe's so I'd be sure there were no bugs because that just might have been what the problem was all along. So I did each step separately and muxed and cut in bbMPEG and everything worked fine. The only thing I changed under the bbMpeg settings was instead of for the mux rate, I put 0 (computed) and for computed bitrate I put MAX. Everything else was the same. So I guess it was something in the decoding process or the actual MP2 encoding process. I'm no expert so it's just I think it must have been.

[schofy12]

I guess I just had to put my thought process down on paper and read it to get them together. Sometimes that's all you need to do to answer your own question. Map the process out.