Copying a DVD

[Dave]

I've just copied a DVD onto my computer, the sound went out of sync with the picture almost from the start .... any ideas where I might have gone wrong?

[TrinityOfOne]

Does it work ok as a DVD playing through the reader?

[Dave]

It works as the original DVD and as the converted .avi file it's just that the sound is out of sync. I'll have to try it again ....

[TrinityOfOne]

Hmm, avis (thought that would be filtered, *smirk*) can be tricky beasts sometimes.

[Dave]

Perhaps there's too much nicking of avis going on :)

[PDG]

Moving avi's to DVD format is tricky. Theoretically, avi's are intended for use on computers and that frequency is recorded at 48khz if I recall correctly. Sounds for analog, or home use are recorded at 44.1khz. This makes the movies immediately fall out of sync, or in cases like mine, slowly until the very end becomes bad martial arts film. It also happens vice versa when moving from DVD to Computer I believe.

As I recall, you need to extract the sound from the movie, convert it to 44.1 and then re-integrate it. Sound complicated? It is. So much so that I personally gave up trying to convert home movies on VHS to DVD. (not those kinda movies).

Anyways, it could also be the following...

1. The computer cannot keep up with the conversion process. ie. slow cpu, insufficuent RAM.
2. The program being used to convert sucks. (sounds like this is your case)

There's a wealth of information and free conversion programs talking about this at www.videohelp.com ;) Good luck, Dave.

[Dave]

Well I think your no 2 optioin is spot on, a sucky suck suck conversion programme. :) Though no. 1 could have something to do with it, I'm multi-tasking as ever!

The sound from the DVD is being shown as 25Khz (???) which the converter programme is not modifying at all. My second try crashed it's now on it's third and last try before ditching completely.

I have seperate programmes for different jobs ....

1) Joins video files together (works great)
2) Seperates them into chunks (works great)
3) Writes/converts them to DVD or MPEG format (that's the complicated one)
4) Converts them from DVD to AVI format (very basic)

[PDG]

Sounds like you're familiar with the process already. I recall amassing a large amount of programs like that as well. Each very specific (and holding it's own quirks). The single most important one was TMPGEnc when I attempted this fiasco about a year ago. Not sure if it's changed much since then.

[Dave]

Well now we have one of life's unsolved mysteries. On the third attempt I reduced the output frame size from an input of 720x576 to 480x384 and it worked! Sound is pretty much spot on, image quality is fine.

/me walks off into distance scratching head .... (twirling walking stick and skipping)