Synchronizing audio and video with DVDImport 5.0

DVD Import 5.0 is much improved as far as keeping the audio in sync with the video on imported media. However, there are some cases that still cause DVD Import to get the audio out of sync. Never fear, there is a new Audio Processing option that lets you override the Sync.

NOTE: this feature will only help if your audio is off consistently throughout the program (which is usually the case), if it is drifting further out of sync as the imported media progresses, this will not help, you could either try guessing the middle amount of offset or find a more robust solution.

To enable this advanced feature, click on "Options..." and enable the "Adjust AV Sync" option.



Once you do that, you'll see a Sync slider under the Audio Processing area.



Unless you already know how far the sync is off (some people are good like that), you're probably thinking, "Great, so I can type in a number of milliseconds! How the heck do I figure that out short of trial and error?"

Well, there is a nifty little app that I ran across that may make your life easier! Download SyncView from Here. Once you have it downloaded, install it.

Now, import your DVD as you normally would.



Once it is done, try previewing it. But at the point you would have previously gotten really disappointed/angry/sad by a bad import, instead, launch SyncView. Double-click the text area to the right of the "Video:" label (1), choose the .mpg file you just imported.



If you purchase the extended version of SyncView, you can directly demultiplex the input file. If you didn't purchase it, there's an extra step. You'll need to get a separate file of audio extracted from that mpeg file. If you already have a lot of knowledge on digital video, you may already have a way to do this, otherwise, I found a free little utility called AoA Audio Extractor which lets you extract a WAV file of the audio. Once you do that, you can set the audio file by double clicking the text to the right of the "Audio:" label (2). Then, make sure you click to turn off the "Monitor audio stream" check box.

Now, the trial and error part, but it will be a lot faster than re-importing the DVD each time... adjust the "Audio Sync (msec)" (3) value by typing one in or using the arrows, when stopped, play the video again, then fine tune it until you get the correct value figured out.

Once you have that value, then simply return to DVD Import and select the closest value to the negative of the one you found you found with the "Sync" slider (i.e. if SyncView told you 224, select -224 with the slider). Import your DVD as you would normally, except for setting that slider, and the result should be a program with the audio and video in sync!

More Help for Unsupported Formats on the SX

I've been working a little more on my little utility for fixing files to play on the SX servers from Tightrope Media Systems. I've added the ability to process files other than MPEG files (such as WMV or most AVI files). It will convert audio in these files as well as fix problems with the video by scaling to 720x480 and converting frame rate to 29.97. When fixing the video, it will transcode the files to the ubiquitous MPEG2 format to play on the server (so don't process files you don't want to have re-encoded).

The new version also adds the ability to read in media from a DVD. When you drag a VIDEO_TS directory (from hard disk or DVD disc) onto the utility it will parse the menu structure and give you a dialog to select any set of programs on the disc to extract. The DVD is extracted to the temporary directory and then saved to the output directory. The dialog allows you to specify a name (you can put a Cablecast Show ID in the beginning of the name) which it uses to generate a final output name.

Read More...

Trouble with audio sample rates and SX Servers

One of the things I've been hearing from our support guys at Tightrope Media Systems is a lot of people have legacy content that is 44.1kHz audio that they would like to play back on their SX Server. The server, however, requires the standard DVD sample rate of 48kHz. This leaves everyone sad.

To help, I built a simple little utility that uses ffmpeg to fix the audio inside an mpeg2 file to be compatible with an SX Server. It's a little Windows app that you can run, drag a batch of files and folders onto and it will do its best to process the files to make them work on the SX.


Download FixMpeg
Read More about FixMpeg at my software site