MainConcept MP2 doesn't do uncompressed WAVs?

yirm wrote on 9/27/2002, 11:04 PM
DVD Complete allows for two types of audio streams -- MPEG I Layer 2, and WAV uncompressed. The latter is offered because some older players (according to DVD Complete's docs) don't play nice with the compressed audio stream.

It seems that the MainConcept plugin *only* exports MPEG I Layer 2 audio. Is this correct?

Also, if I want to export the audio from my DV file separately (DVD Complete can accept audio from a separate file from the video), should I just export as wav, uncompressed, 16-bit, 48KHz (thus leaving the audio "untouched")? That is, this format of audio should work well in a DVD?

-Jeremy

Comments

Jamz wrote on 9/28/2002, 1:39 AM
After you render your file to mpeg as an elementary stream, go back & render the audio as a wave, 48k 16 bit & it will work just fine. I have to do this for Reel DVD also.
riredale wrote on 9/29/2002, 11:06 PM
I have never used the DVD Complete product and haven't seen the supporting documents, but the reason it offers two forms of audio input (MP2 and wav) probably has little to do with "old" DVD players. It's the DVD spec.

In NTSC countries, the only official audio formats initially supported were wav and AC-3 (aka "Dolby Digital"). The only formats supported in PAL countries were wav and MP2. So wav is accepted everywhere, and if you really want to bump the video bitstream rate for longer videos (by compressing the audio) the only options were AC-3 for NTSC and MP2 for PAL.

Because Dolby seems to have its head in the sand (or perhaps other places) they have charged a king's ransom for the use of their codec. As a result, the Common User doesn't have access to AC-3. By contrast, lots of MPEG2 codecs support MP2 audio, and as a result you are seeing a lot of MP2 even in NTSC countries, even though that's not strictly legal. These days, it appears that most set-top DVD players are just as happy with MP2 audio as with AC-3. In my opinion, Dolby is gradually making itself irrelevant.

As noted, even though the MainConcept codec in VV3 doesn't "do" wav directly, you can easily get around this limitation by doing two encodes: the first one specifying just a video elementary stream, and the second one specifying just a wav stream. Your authoring program will then use both streams to build a vob file, the heart of a video DVD.