Encoding with AC3 audio

[MaximRecoil]

I have several movies that are very high quality and they are split into two 700 mb parts. The video is encoded with Xvid and the audio is AC3 at 448 kbps according to the advanced summary of the files in the Windows properties dialog box.

How do you encode a movie with AC3 audio like this? I have the AC3 codec required for playback but I have no option to encode a movie with it. Do you just select "uncompressed audio" when you are setting up the encoding process or is there an AC3 codec (other than the playback one that I have) that I need to get?

Also, does anyone have any recommendations for encoding software and codecs in general? For the video codec I currently use Koepi's XviD-04102002-1 _ALPHA_ Release That I got about a year or a year and a half ago from the DivX site. For audio I use Fraunhofer MP3 Pro v1.263 codec. For the Software I use the beta release of FlasKMPEG 0.7.8.39 (seems to work a lot better than the old 0.5.94 version that I used for a long time).

This all works great for me with good picture and sound quality results. Could I be doing better though?

[UncasMS]

in most dvds you'll find ac3 as the audio format

simply demuxing these ac3 streams from the vobs (via dvd2avi) and later on muxing them with the video file is all that it takes

i dont know how flask might handle this but decent routines like DVX will simply let you select ac3 as the input stream and mux it automatically after the video-conversion has been done

of course you could create your avi-video first and then manually mux ac3 to it using virtualdubMOD or avi-mux

in tha latter cae, of cour, you'll have to keep in mind that the tool which creates the video MUST take the ac3-size into account in order to achieve a correct final output size - if done manually

tools like DVX do that automatically

[MaximRecoil]

Thanks for the reply.

You recommend DVX then as a replacement for Flask? Is it a difficult application to use?

My Xvid codec seems to be a somewhat old build from Koepi. I don't have any problems with it but should I get a newer version?

Is the MP3 codec that I am using as good as it could/should be?

Also, this is sort of off-topic but I saw what appeared to be a telesync of the new TCM movie (it wasn't a screener and it had cigarette burns so I assume it was a telesync) and the quality was amazing, on par with a good DVD to avi movie. How is this possible? I have seen some decent telesyncs before but nothing approaching this in terms of picture quality. It was almost like seeing it on DVD (albeit with smaller resolution). It was an Xvid with MP3 audio and 512x272 resolution.

[UncasMS]

Is it a difficult application to use?

nope

take a look:
DVX