DVD made from MP4s has no sound

AtomBomb

So I'm trying to make a DVD out of 3 .mp4 files. All together the files equal 2.6gb. I made the .mp4's with Nero Encode, from 3 DVDs of a presentation/conference thing. The DVDs didn't have an AUDIO_TS folder (which seems weird), but the sound is on there somehow because when you play each DVD you hear it and the .mp4's all have sound as well when I play them on my PC.

I'm using FAVC to put them together. When I'm done I get a DVD that looks great but has no sound. I have it keeping the working files and I see that it is creating an AUDIO_TS folder, but it's empty.

I've tried every option on the audio tab (which sucks, because it takes 45 minutes or so and really slows down my PC) with no luck. I've also tried to change the .mp4's to AVIs with handbrake, but it just created 0 byte files immediately.

Anyone have a suggestion of what I can do? I'd prefer not to go straight from the 3 source DVDs to the new DVD as disc 2 has 30 minutes of nothing at the end (camera ran out of film/memory I'm assuming, it points at the ceiling right before it goes gray).

shutz

For most video DVDs, the AUDIO_TS folder is left empty. Audio that is supposed to go with the video is interleaved inside the MPEG streams that are in the .VOB files you find in the VIDEO_TS folder. The AUDIO_TS folder is generally only used for audio-only streams, in particular for DVD-Audio discs.

Going back to your problem, it simply seems to me that your DVD-making software (FAVC... never heard of that one...) might not be able to decode the audio stream in your MP4 files. MP4 files usually have AAC sound (the same codec used by iTunes) and not all DVD-authoring software has the proper codecs for decoding AAC and transcoding to PCM, MPEG Layer 2 or AC3, which DVD players can play.

See if you can find the proper codec files (for decoding AAC audio) for your DVD-authoring software of choice, or better yet, if you still have Nero Encode, use that to generate valid MPEG-2 video, and then import that into FAVC (that last part shouldn't take very long, as the video will already be properly encoded for DVD.)

Or just use Nero Vision, if you have that as part of your Nero install. If it was able to encode those MP4s from DVDs, it should have no problem doing it in reverse.

Still, you'd actually be better off just ripping the original DVDs, and then using some basic MPEG editing software to cut out only the bits you want to keep. Try VirtualDubMod, or any of the other MPEG editing tools at VideoHelp.com

Doing it this way, you keep the original video intact, instead of generating video that was transcoded from DVD to MP4 and then back again. Each transcoding step is lossy, you'd be losing video quality at every step.

If you need more help, you should try spending more time at www.videohelp.com , they have all sorts of tools and guides to help you, and their forums are fairly active, too.

AtomBomb

The version of Nero Recode I'm using is a free standalone, and it only makes MP4s I'll try the other things you suggested. Do you have a free ripper that you'd recommend? These aren't copy protected or anything.

EDIT- Finally got a good DVD. I reripped them like you suggested, this time as MKVs. Burned that and it worked. I tried to use VirtualDubMod to edit, but the audio was off by 2 seconds or so in the 3 attempts I made.

Thanks for the help!

shutz

When I said "re-rip", I meant you should just rip the video streams off the DVDs (as in, get the VOBs onto your hard drive. I actually think you could have just copied the files, since your DVDs weren't encrypted.)

As for VirtualDubMod, it has some problems with audio synch if the audio isn't PCM (ie., an uncompressed WAV file) to start with. What I usually do is extract the audio stream (VDubMod can do that) and then find the relevant software to decompress that audio to a 48kHz WAV file. If it's an MP3, or in the unlikelihood of an MP2, Winamp can make a WAV file for you. If it's AC3, just find an AC3 converter on the VideoHelp.com site, and generate a WAV file.

You can then load that WAV file back as one of the audio streams in VDubMod, disable the original stream, and generate the MPEG-2 files you need for you DVD-authoring software.

Ripping, then compressing to MKV, then back to DVD is as lossy as what you were doing before. If you're satisfied with the results, good for you, but keep in mind that you just lost a significant amount of quality, plus the two recoding steps (encode to MKV -- what video codec did you use? H264? -- and then back to MPEG-2 for DVD) probably took a while, whereas the steps I outlined above would have been much faster, since only the Audio would have had to be re-compressed (and the intermediate step is lossless, so you lose less quality that way...)