TMPGENC Audio issues DVD->MPG conversion

[thallon]

I've struggled with this one and am now completely stumped - hopefully there are some ideas out there on solving...

As an aside, I've been through many of the digests for ripping, converting, burning, etc. so I'm family with both the process and the tools. Well, mostly...

Problem description - ripping (smartripper) VOB's, preparing (DVD2AVI) and converting some scenes to MPEG2 (tmpgenc) via DVD NTSC wizard. The scene marking & conversion seems to work okay and the MPG plays fine in Windows media player and several DVD applications BUT (you knew that was coming right?) when I check the MPG file with MPEG Properties, I get the following error message:

"ERROR in audio packet header!"

And when I try to bring the MPG file into something like Ulead Studio to prepare for burning, it indicates there is no audio stream. Yet it plays fine, with proper audio. Everything is synced up fine, no pops or hisses. What's strange is that I can use the same input files (d2v, WAV) into tmpgenc and use the VCD wizard and it works perfect - no errors reported on the resulting mpg file. So it's obviously specific to the MPEG2 template, and further specific to sound. I've tried both with native tmpgenc audio encoding as well as with SSRC/TOOLAME external audio plugins.

Any thoughts on what this could be and how to troubleshoot?

tia...

[lupinpunch]

let me get this straight, you have an mpeg that work fine but when you try to make a vcd, the audio is lost? If that is so. use virtual dub to extract a wav then merge both the audio and video into a compliant mpg with tmpgenc.

[thallon]

Close - I end up with what appears to be a proper MPG-2 file and that's what I want (no loss of visual clarity but sound downsampled to stereo or some such). It plays in media player as well as all popular dvd software. When I go to DVD authoring software however, the audio stream isn't recognized and is ignored. Testing the MPG file in mpeg-properties tells me that the audio stream is invalid. So what I can't figure out is why various MPG-2 players can play with audio+video fine yet the audio stream is considered to be "invalid" for any editor software. I have tested downsampling the "invalid" MPG-2 file to MPG-1 (vcd) and all the editor programs are fine with both the audio & video. So it's something unique about it being encoded as MPG-2. I've also split apart the streams and then re-encoded them together as you suggested but the results are the same. thanks though.