I have 14 episodes of a show that I'm attempting to encode and then author onto DVD. I've been able to do 12 of the 14, but the first 2 come up with incorrect times when I add them into 3.0 XPress. They both say about 8 minutes, when in fact they are 44 mins long. I've tried MANY ways to fix this. I've split the sound and video out, nothing, I've tried to settle for VCD format but when I do that the sound is all out of sync. Any ideas why these two files are that way, and is there a way to fix them so I can encode them with 3.0 XPress? Thanks for any help you can give. Jonathan P.S. I've split out the sound and added it in, and it says 44 mins. So it seems to be primarly a video issue.
This is probably because your audio is VBR. Try encoding it to an uncompressed PCM 16 bit wave file using GoldWave at http://www.goldwave.com (load the video file directly and save to a wave file) and encoding it into MP2 with an external encoder such as toolame using CBR settings. You'll need to downsample your audio to 44100 hz, if necessary (especially if your audio is reported to have a frequency of 48000 hz). You can also load the wave file as the audio source of your video and let TMPGEnc encode the audio. However, I will continue to use toolame until I'm convinced that the TMPGEnc MP2 encoder can match the quality of open-source encoders. I recommend encoding to Joint Stereo at a CBR bitrate between 64-384 using PsyModel 2 in toolame. Be sure to match the settings you used accordingly in TMPGEnc. Also, if your video preview in TMPGEnc (or any other video editing or encoding program) shows the text "WARNING: NOTHING TO OUTPUT - BFRAME DECODER LAG", you'll definitely need to output the audio as a wave first. You may want to set the Start Frame to 1 to remove this error during playback.
