mp2 volume adjustment

[Brent212]

Ok, I've searched all over for the answer to this question, and found many things that come close to answering it, but none of the topics, faqs, or guides that I've looked at seem to help me solve this problem.

I captured a vhs tape using my hauppauge 250 in DVD Standard mode. The quality of the video is excellent, but I had the input volume set too high, so that when I authored a dvd with the .mpg file, it basically sounds terrible. So I demuxed the file with TMPGEnc and used a program called Audacity to open up the .mp2 file and lower the volume. I didn't realize that I would have to re-encode the file after doing this. Is there any way to lower the volume on a .mp2 file without re-encoding it? I've read all the posts mentioning the besplit usage with the " -ota( g max ) " switch, but that's for normalization, which might help if I actually could find the other ota options (where the heck is that friggin' ota.txt file??? - I've seen this asked before but never answered). Is there a way to use besplit to lower the volume? It'd be nice if besplit provided a -? switch to display all it's usage options.

If I can't find a way to lower the volume without re-encoding, what should I use to do the re-encoding? I tried just saving the file with audacity, which used lame to create an mp3, but I couldn't mux this with the .mpv file in TMPGEnc. How can I lower the volume and then get it back to the original file type? I think its file type is "MPEG1, layer 2 48kHz, 384 kbps", although I could be wrong.

One concern I have with this entire process is that I don't want to have to re-encode the video. The captured file is dvd-compliant, but I'm worried that if I de-mux, alter the audio, and re-mux, a non-dvd-compliant file will be created and my authoring software will try to re-encode it. I had a problem already with ULead Movie Factory 2 re-encoding my captured files even if I checked the box to disable dvd-compliant file checking. I now use TMPGEnc DVD Author, and it doesn't have this problem with captured files, but I'm not sure what will happen if I try dropping in a file that's been re-muxed with TMPGEnc.

Any help/comments/suggestions/insults would be much appreciated here. Thanks

[echooff]

There was a thread on this about a week in the audio section. try using besplit located

here (http://dspguru.doom9.org)

[Brent212]

Like I said, I've researched besplit, but no one seems to know how to use it to do what I need it to do (lower the volume of an mp2), although it seems like it should be able to do this, because of the "-ota( -G max )" usage. If anyone knows of a -ota option other than -G max, I'd be very interested to see it. I've tried simply using options like "-G min" and "-G -x" (where x is a number), but none of these seem to do anything. I've searched the entire forum simply for the word "besplit" and haven't been able to find a thread that answers this question. If you know of a thread that does, I'd appreciate a link. Or if anyone knows where to find that ota.txt file that'd be awesome as well.

Isn't this the Audio section?

[Brent212]

Ok, so I demuxed, opened the .mp2 up in audacity, lowered the volume, saved it as a wav, used TMPGEnc (along with toolame.exe) to encode the wav back to a .mp2, and finally re-muxed that back together with the .mpv in TMPGEnc to get a complete .mpg with quieter sound. One problem - there is a very noticeable delay in the sound now. Something will happen in the video, and about .5 - 1 second later you'll hear it. I opened both the original .mp2 and the re-encoded .mp2 in winamp and they both seem identical as far as length and speed. I can pick a spot in the track, watch the counter and listen, and then play the other file and do the same, and they are identical as far as I can tell. The length being the same also indicates this.

So that narrows the problem down to the multiplexing done in TMPGEnc. I actually used TMPGEnc Plus to do the muxing and de-muxing, if that matters. I used regular TMPGEnc to do the encoding of the wav to mp2 because Plus gave me a program error.

Is there a way to correctly multiplex the new .mp2 and .mpv files? Can I do it somehow in TMPGEnc Plus and just specify a delay in the audio so it'll match up (which would be annoying, but I could probably make it about right).

Also, the new complete .mpg is about 2,590 MB, whereas the original complete .mpg is about 2,670 MB. What's the reason for this? Is there missing header information? Is some of this missing info needed for using the file to author a DVD? I'm worried that this will cause my authoring software (TMPGEnc DVD Author) to re-encode the file when creating the burnable files.

Thanks for any help,
Brent