DVD MovieFactory losing audio sync

[John Wray]

OK, a serious problem I've run into with DVD MovieFactory.

I have a 1:40 hour capture I made with my WinTV using HuffYUV under AVI_IO. The captured .avi files play back fine. I used virtualDub to frameserve them to TMPGEnc to encode them into two ~50 minute MPEG-2 files, both using TMPGEnc's DVD template, one using 2-pass VBR, the other using CQ_VBR (I originally encoded them both as CQ_VBR, but they wouldn't fit onto a 4.7G DVD like that, so I re-encoded one using 2-pass VBR). Both These MPEG-2 files also play back fine. I used DVD MovieFactory to add some menus and burn them onto DVD. The resulting DVD suffers from bad audio sync problem (several seconds after only a few minutes of play). If I go to one of the chapter marks I created, the playback is already out of sync. I get this out-of-sync playback using either a JVC DVD player or PowerDVD.

I know that DVD MovieFactory has to de-multiplex the MPEG-2 file into separate audio and video streams prior to burning onto DVD. How is sync supposed to be maintained between these two streams?

Is anyone else who's using DVD MovieFactory using variable bit-rate MPEG-2? That's the only thing I can think of that might be confusing DVD MovieFactory.

John

[Brian Ellis]

John

I cannot really help you other than to say I have done short and long projects (20 mins to 3 hrs) with DVD-MF without any problems, no glitches, loss of synch. etc. OK, I've mainly used the Ligos and the new Ulead codecs, although I did one project with TMPGEnc, without finding any significant advantage. I've used both CBR and VBR without problems. The only significant difference is that my inout is a DV AVI file.

You don't mention your h/w or o/s. If you are using 98SE, for example, you may possibly be running into file size problems. Or you may be marginally low or slow with your image file. If you play back from the hard disk version, is your synch OK? If not, then your DVD will never be OK How have you set up your MF temp and image files? Ideally, they should be on a fast drive with > 15 Gb free.

Sorry, it could be any of a number of things. We need to know more. But first of all, see whether conversion from AVI to MPG in DVD-MF is the same.

[John Wray]

I've found a solution to this. On Ulead's support web-site, although a search for "sync" doesn't turn up anything, the "CD/DVD Burning" patch says that it fixes an audio sync problem with MPEG files encoded using "certain hardware encoders". I guess TMPGEnc counts as one of those . Anyway, with this patch installed, the same MPEG files burn to DVD without losing sync.

John

[keithm]

I found that if I let try to add chapter points using the scene detect function to a long mpeg file, the audio is always out of sync. In the end I chopped the video up into seperate files and added each mpeg individually: not the answer I wante but it worked.

[wkulecz]

Hmm...

I've put 17 chapter points in an ~1hr 30min MPEG2 with no sync problems.

I find a bug in DVD MF where sometimes there is 10-15 second "gaps" where I can't set a chapter point, but other than that it works fine as I only want simple menus.

--wally.