I've been working on an authored DVD for our hospital and medical school. It worked quite well after using tmpenc and maestro with the m2v and mp2 files for audio and video.
Unfortunately, some people came up with no audio in their DVD. I can only assume these people had players which would not accept mp2 as audio. Hence I converted the mp2 to ac3 via AC3Machine using the BeSweet codec. Settings: 48khz, channel mode:stereo, bitrate:384...I think those are the important ones.
The AC3 disc functioned fine, but tremendous clicking/popping in all audio tracks.
I know this problem well, and never managed to solve it via BeSweet (AC3machine), which just doesn't seem to produce DVD compliant streams (or neither of us have figured out the right settings).
There are two ways to get around the problem:
1) Use Sonic's ReelDVD to encode the AC3 audio. Works like a charm, but fairly expensive if you are getting the product only for AC3 conversion.
2) Assuming that you have space on the DVDr, include both the bad AC3 and the MP2 audio tracks on the disc. The people that are not able to hear the MP2 track now, will be able to hear it if the AC3 track is present. Some DVD players (particularly NTSC models that are not set to handle PAL discs) require the presence of at least one AC3 file, even if it is not the one being used.
When I am converting numerous AVI files to put on one DVD, I often do AC3 for only the first video, and then use MP2 for the rest as it is easier to just let TMPGEnc output a muxed and ready to go file.
Exactly...it seems that something about Besweet (AC3machine) didn't agree with the DVD standard. Since you and I have both experienced the pops and cracks, I am surprised that it doesn't come up more often.
ReelDVD gives you the option of importing MP2 audio as is, or converting it to AC3 automatically. I useReelDVD to do the conversion to AC3 even if I am going to author in another program. Since I started doing it this way I have had no more noise problems.
You can get a demo of ReelDVD here:
http://www.mediarte.com/products/dvd/reeldvd/trial/ However, I am not certain about how much functionality the demo will give you.
On the other hand, maybe you could knock the audio bitrate down on each of two tracks and solve the problem. Or, you could split your credits off as a separate track and encode the audio for the credits only in AC3 with the main body of the movie in MP2 format. Like I said, it seems AC3 has to be present on the DVD somewhere, not necessarily in the track you are viewing.
Sorry,
But now thatI think about it, I cannot say categorically that having an AC3 track anywhere on the DVD will enable MP2 audio on unrelated tracks. I really haven't enough experience with other machines to stand behind that 100%.
It is, however, worth a try if the ReelDVD option is an impossibility.
