These are probably not the problem, but "just in case..."

A person on another forum recently questioned why DVDA was re-encoding her AC3 file. After several back-and-forth questions, she triple-checked her process and finally noticed she was creating an "aa3" file (not AC3). Once she selected AC3, everything worked as she expected.

Also, in the Optimize setup, what does it say for the audio? Is there a checkmark, or another symbol (make sure you are not looking at the audio for a menu).

guitard, Question: Is this an AC3 file you added to your project or is it an AC3 stream within a video file? If it's already muxed into a video file, DVDA will always demux them and thus have to re-encode the audio.

If that's what you're already doing, giving DVDA separate AC3 files, then there must be something about those AC3 files that DVDA doesn't like. What was used to encode them and what settings were used?

Rob

In most projects, the audio is muxed into the mpeg2 file that I encoded using Vegas Video. It doesn't make sense that DVD Architect would have problems with the audio in an mpeg2 created using Vegas.

I've tried again and again, and no matter what bitrate I use in Vegas, or whether I use a separate .ac3 file altogether, DVD Architect will always recompress the audio to 192. The only exception is if I use LPCM audio. I occasionally like to use LPCM audio, but that takes up a lot of space, so I generally prefer .ac3.

Thanks to everyone for your comments / suggestions.

It doesn't make sense that DVD Architect would have problems with the audio in an mpeg2 created using Vegas.

I imagine it makes sense from Sony's software engineers' standpoint. As I said, if the audio and video or already muxed together -- no matter if the file came from Vegas or some other program -- DVD Architect must demux them and re-encode the audio. Maybe someone smarter than I knows the technical reasons for this requirement, but it's the way it's always been -- so I trust that there is one. :)

whether I use a separate .ac3 file altogether, DVD Architect will always recompress the audio to 192

My guess is that, in the case of you using a separate AC3 file, something else is causing DVDA to re-encode. I just created a short AC3 file at 224kbps and added it to a DVDA project. According to DVDA, no recompression is needed.

In DVD Architect's Explorer, right-click on one of your 224kbps AC3 files, choose Properties, and copy / paste the properties here.

Rob

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In most projects, the audio is muxed into the mpeg2 file that I encoded using Vegas Video. It doesn't make sense that DVD Architect would have problems with the audio in an mpeg2 created using Vegas.
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Are you using the DVD Architect encoding templates from Vegas? By default, they do not include the audio muxed in with the video (afaik). So are you going into CUSTOM, and then checking the box to include audio? If you are doing that, then I think the muxed audio will be mpeg audio -- and so DVDA will re-encode the mpeg audio to your DVDA Audio settings...