Thanks, Ian.

I just downloaded VD-MPEG2 and loaded the file in question. The audio portion of File/Information reads: 48 KHz Stereo, 256 Kbps, AC3.

When I select “Input Playback” I get an error message “No audio decompressor could be found to decompress the source audio format.” I haven’t done any processing of the input file, but when I select “output playback,” the video plays but there’s no audio. Any guesses as to what’s going on? Any chance that if I render the input file (it’s 2-hours long...Probably a long rendering process), that sound will somehow be present in the AVI file?

It looks like VirtualDub doesn't have an inbuilt AC-3 decoder, but at least we're on the right track! Assuming you haven't got a DVD player already installed on your PC (and if you have, we're in trouble!) you need to install one - there's a free one here. I don't know if it has its own decoder, but it's a possibility. Note that this player is designed to help with DVD authoring - it may look a bit odd ;-). There's a free AC-3 decoder here, but I'd recommend starting with a DVD player because you'll probably need it if you're going to author your own DVDs.

Rendering isn't going to help, but in any event, it's always worth just selecting a short part of your video and rendering that if you want to experiment - 2 hours of video will take a long time to render!

Ian G.

Ian,

Thanks again. I have Windows Media Player and it plays the file fine (with sound). This may be getting more complicated than warranted based on my needs and the capabilities that I already have.

What sent me down this trail is a post by someone (on the Screenblast forum, I think) claiming that you can edit the .vro files created by Panasonic's DVD-RAM format by simply changing the filename extension to .mpg. By doing that I got the video but no audio, so I posted the start of this thread.

As it turns out, Panasonic supplies software to allow minor edits (e.g., remove commercials) You can then resave as vor or convert vro to mpg but it requires another processing step:

* load Panasonic's MovieAlbum SE (I think it's called)
* Import the .vro file and save it as .mpg (takes about 1/2 movie running time)

I've been using Pinnacle's Studio 9 to do most of my editing and ScreenBlast for some of it. I just use Panasonic's software to do the conversion vro->mpg. I figured that simply changing the filename may eliminate that additional conversion step where MovieAlbum SE is needed.

If I have to still use another software to do the AC-3 decoding, I'll just stick to my previous routine.

Thanks anyway... I've learned something.

Lee

Sorry, we don't import ac-3 (Vegas 5.0 will export it). As you know, there are free/share ac-3 converters if you ever want to try a different routine.

Suzan

I use DVD-Lab for DVD authoring. If you add a completely rendered MPEG-2 file with audio, it wants to know if you want to demux the file. I found that when I dropped a VRO file from my Panaxonic RAM disc into DVD-Lab, it accepted it as is. But if I changed the file extension to VOB, it offered up the option to demux. Once I had a separate sound file for my video, I used BeSweet to convert the audio file to a format SB could use. I then dropped the VRO file and the audio file into SB for editing. There was no problem with OOS with the final product. I did this with a mini-series that was on earlier this year.