Lame ACM mp3 codec not available from Vegas

Laurence wrote on 11/13/2006, 2:46 PM
I've been messing with formatting video to upload onto sites like Google Video and Youtube. Both of them will accept a number of video formats, but suggest that the audio be formatted as 128kbs mp3 to avoid recompression.

The default Windows mp3 codec allows bitrates of up to 56kbs, but I need to be able to go up to at least 128kbs.

I search around and find that the way to do this is to download and install the free Lame ACM mp3 codec. I do this and it seems to install fine, but no matter what I try I can't see it on the list of available codecs from either Vegas or Virtualdub.

Does anyone know how to manually check the installation so that my applications can actually access this codec?

Comments

Laurence wrote on 11/15/2006, 6:27 AM
Well I got it working. I did a registry search for "lame" and found a list of a bunch of audio codecs. All of them had "1"s in front of them except for "lame" which had a "0". I changed the "0" to a "1" and that fixed it. Not that I really have any idea of exactly what I did...
farss wrote on 11/15/2006, 11:35 AM
Why not use the Fraunhoffer mp3 codec that you paid for with Vegas?
Laurence wrote on 11/15/2006, 11:37 AM
I can use that if I render an mp3 file, but not as the audio portion of an avi. I wish I could use it.
farss wrote on 11/15/2006, 11:43 AM
But doesn't Google etc use Flash?
bStro wrote on 11/15/2006, 1:41 PM
Yes, but one is better off uploading a higher quality file. No matter what you send them, Google, YouTube, and the like are going to encode your file however they want -- even if your file is already encoded. It's just an automatic part of the process.

Rob
farss wrote on 11/15/2006, 1:46 PM
Thanks for that, kind of what I feared.
I've noticed a significant difference in quality between YouTube content and Grouper, wonder why.

Bob.
Laurence wrote on 11/15/2006, 8:27 PM
After all that, every time I use Lame mp3 encoded audio, the upload fails. I've also noticed that if you upload a file a high bit rate (seeing as it's going to be re-encoded anyway this would make sense), you get some pretty bad errors. I'm trying to find the sweet spot.
dirtynbl wrote on 11/16/2006, 10:12 AM
probably because you are using a VBR mp3 file. YouTube freaks out at VBR because its horrribly coded.
Laurence wrote on 11/16/2006, 10:20 AM
Nope. I was using CBR. I'm not a big fan of VBR in either video or audio.
JL wrote on 11/16/2006, 6:13 PM
FWIW, I recently went through a similar exercise experimenting with various encodings for YouTube and found reasonably good results using standard wmv settings available inside Vegas. More info:

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=494709

JL
Laurence wrote on 11/16/2006, 7:01 PM
Interesting stuff JL. I usually try to avoid wmv encoding because of how it dulls the color. Yeah I know about the Studio to RGB color correction and that does improve things, but it still looks a little washed out to me. I'd probably experiment more with it if I hadn't found and fallen in love with DiVX and Stage 6 as a delivery medium. Stage 6 video looks close to a DVD. Google Video and YouTube look like webcams.