How to set chapter markers in audio files without video part

Hippo wrote on 8/6/2003, 10:38 AM
Hello,

How to create chapter markers in a single AC3 5.1 audio file without any video part. I like to burn and play long AC3 sound files on a DVD software player and still retain the possibility to skip and move to different audio tracks. The other menu options, namely choosing music compilation or slide show doesn't permit setting of chapter points inside a AC3 or WAV file. The only option I found in the DVD-A program is to put a single still picture, instead of the normal video mpeg file, at the beginning of the DVD Architect compilation. However, upon writing the project DVD-A insists to recompress the single bitmap picture to a default 8 Mbps video stream of equal length as the audio file. I can set the bit rate for video down to the minimum value of 0.19 Mbps (zero is not possible it turns out !?) to reduce the video size, but the recompression step takes an awful lot of unnecessary time. What are better and quicker options to include tracks/chapters points in audio-only files ?

Same question for unusual formatted AC3 sound files (having non-448 Kbps bitrate and non 5.1 AC3 channel information): how to avoid recompression of such files (e.g. AC3 4.0 files) in DVD-A ?

Comments

jeffcrow wrote on 8/6/2003, 12:11 PM
As far as I know, with DVDA the only way to do that would be to have video and audio like you have already tried. I read a post in another forum a long time ago were someone was doing just that, but they used a video clip that was just 1 frame of black video. They did not say anything about render times, so maybe it would spend less time rendering a blank video frame, which is different then a blank photo, since the video frame is already in video format it would require less processing to convert it. Don't know if that will help any, you would just have to try it. If you do that in Vegas, you could use Vegas for setting markers, I don't think DVDA lets you hear the audio when you set markers there. So you would need a black video clip the full length of the audio, that would take more time to render, but maybe black would have less data to process?