Bad Sound Quality

[GregiBoy]

Not a lot!!!

You can actually have a look at the profiles yourself by navigating to the profiles directory and opening them with Notepad.

Bitrate has tight parameters and also resolution specifically set so that I know that it will work on Samsung TV's that play from USB hard drives.

A bonus is that it seems to work well with PC's also.

[GregiBoy]

Are you happy with the quality now and do you have any idea where we have differed from the procedure that caused the files with no sound as I would like to know for reference?

[seanfrisbey]

I'm not sure exactly what the differences are. I've got to head to bed. It's midnight here right now. Is there any way for me to contact you tomorrow with a more active method? Like AIM or Live Messenger or any other IMing service? It would be a lot easier to work things out that way. I'm going to try some things tomorrow and get back to you with the results.

[GregiBoy]

I'll send you a PM with my address in the morning.

[seanfrisbey]

Alright. Sounds good. What time is it there, by the way?

[seanfrisbey]

Ugh...now I'm not even getting sound with YOUR profile! Even if I don't change anything. I've tried restarting the program, and nothing.

[seanfrisbey]

I did chapter 20 and it didn't work. I went back to chapter 2 and it worked. Is it possible that certain chapter won't encode alone?

[GregiBoy]

Not possible. 7pm and off for dinner with girlfriend. Talk tomorrow.

Suggestion. try whole movie overnight.

[KmR]

Not sure how much this will help... But maybe you should update your drivers... For well anything possible but I would like chipset and sound card would be the most useful in this case.

If you have an intel chipset based motherboard you'll most likely need this:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Deta...d=816&lang=eng

Disclaimer/don't blame me if you take this advice and things get worse:
You may want to look for update BIOS and/or Firmware for your DVD drive...

But if you've never updated BIOS/Firmware before - be extra careful or do everything else possible first - if you screw up the update(s), then you could prevent the drive or motherboard from functioning at all. (Which would be very difficult to fix if you only have 1 comp or don't know what you've gotten yourself into)

[seanfrisbey]

Thanks for the advice on driver updating. Being a computer technician, I have done it before, so no worries there. And actually, that was one of the first steps I took to try and solve everything.

The good thing is that I have been able to get it to work! The strange part about that, however, is that is does seem that it was my choice of preview chapters that was giving me the issues. If I did a full movie, it was fine. If I chose chapters, for the most part it was fine. It seemed that only the very short chapters (under 2 minutes) were giving me these issues.

Take Alien for example. Last night, I tried chapter 2 (about 7.5 minutes). It worked. Then i tried chapter 20 (about 1.5 minutes). This chapter, however, did not work. I alternated between the two chapters a bunch and kept getting the same results. So, I stuck The Lord of the Rings in and imported the whole thing over night. I woke up this morning and all is well in Middle Earth!

I don't know what the problem was, or even how it was really solved. In the end, I ended up using the generic.avi.H264.audiocopy profile with a modified bitrate. My only problem now is that I would like to tag these videos. However, movies like The Lord of the Rings are too big, and no editors will open it because it is bigger than 2GB (AVI 1 size limit?). So now I'm running the video through VirtualDubSurround to convert it to AVI 2 so I can tag it properly.

[GregiBoy]

I generally do a split by subchapters on files this size. I have only struck a few, LOTR & Apocalypse Now Redux.

It is the OpenDML specs which set the 2Gb limit.

You could also go to MKV which has no such limit and edit the tags with VLC.

I have seen this no audio on a short chapter somewhere else. I'll try to remember.

[GregiBoy]

I just tried Chapter 2 of Alien which on my copy is 2:41.

All worked fine with audio. This chapter is the credits at the end of the movie and the volume is very low and I had to turn it up considerably to hear it.

I played the original DVD and it is exactly the same, very low volume,

[GregiBoy]

Sure enough, I did remember correctly.



2 mins seems to be around the magic figure for the smallest size of a chapter to encode with sound.

[seanfrisbey]

Well, I have everything working now. Thank you SO much for your help! One more question now: bitrate. You said it is your preference to do 1100kbps. I would like to do it higher than that, but then I would have to split a few movies to do so, as they would be too big to tag. I have tried MKV and can't seem to get anything (VLC included) to tag it. I am sticking with generic.avi.h264.audiocopy. If I do end up increasing the video bitrate and split the file into two portions, hwo would I go about playing back the movie seamlessly?

[KmR]

How bad was the quality of generic.mp4.h264.aac? This shouldn't have any file size limitation... What bitrate did you use? I use 3000 when I encode to WMV and always get very good quality videos... File size is about 1-1.4 Gigs per hour of video...