VSO Software Forum

I'm currently in the process of burning a number of old music videos (in mpeg2 format, converted and de-interlaced from VOB) to DVD. These videos all have their original audio tracks, which are in the PCM format at 1536 kb/s. Now, since these are native DVD audio tracks, I'd assumed they could be copied directly along with the video. I was wrong! Not only does ConvertX re-encode them (into AC 3), it does so at the very low bit rate of 192 kb/s. This is no good for my purposes, as the DVDs are being used to archive the videos - there's no point doing so if I'm going to be losing the original high-quality audio. So, am I just being dumb here? Is there a setting somewhere (other than 'copy when possible' which I've already selected) that would enable me to keep the original audio? Or, failing that, to specify a higher output bit rate that would minimise the quality loss?

ConvertXtoDVD always converts to typical DVD standards.

This should explain:
https://searchstorage.techtarget.com/de ... /DVD-Audio

Thanks very much for the quick response, and for the informative link. I'm still a little puzzled, though - the audio tracks I'm using are already DVD audio streams so should be fully compliant. Still, I could live with the format conversion if only I could keep the bitrate (or at least set it to higher than 192 kb/s, which is awfully low). ConvertXtoDVD is reducing the bitrate of the original audio by a whopping 87.5% so I'm unquestionably losing data (and quality) there.

As an afterthought, could I just replace the converted files in the VIDEO-TS folder that ConvertXtoDVD has created with the originals (renamed appropriately)?

This is growing more interesting. Having now played around with my original files, I'm not sure the original audio tracks are 1536 kb/s. They display as such in MediaInfo but when I transcode the source mpeg files into VOBs I seem to get a selection of different bitrate outputs. So, the 1536 kb/s may come from the mpeg container rather than the DVD source.

My new plan is to encode the original audio files as higher bitrate (640 kb/s) AC3 files to see if ConvertXtoDVD will then accept them as compliant and copy them. I may still try the file-replacement-in-the-VIDEO-TS-folder trick (since ConvertXtoDVD also significantly reduces the bitrate of the video) but that's an experiment for another day!