No sound in TMPGEnc Plus

[mlaviolette]

I'm capturing from my old Canon Optura 200 MC digital video camcorder using WinDV and VirtualDub through firewire. The resulting avi plays fine (video and audio) in any application except my encoder, TMPGEnc Plus (the last version, 2.54). Audio is PCM. When I try to process the file using your recommended settings (or any settings for that matter), no sound is played through TMPGEnc. The audio level line is flat, the encoded file's video is good but no sound. I even tried decompressing the audio with AVI audio decompressor, but get the same result. Any ideas? Thanks.

[admin]

1. What does Gspot show as the audio codec needed?
2. And what type of DV stream is it? (Type 1 or Type 2)

Gspot explained about 40% down this page: http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/vid...nd-sources.htm

It could be something as simple as raising the DirectShow filter to the top priority in the TMPGEnc environmental settings option window.

[mlaviolette]

For the audio portion, GSpot says No Codec Required. The type is Type 2.

[admin]

Load the DV AVI file into VirtualDub, hit play. Does the audio play?

If no, post back.

If yes, use the in/out editing marks, and select about 5 seconds worth. Go to the video menu, and select stream copy. Same for audio. Save as AVI this tiny segment. Upload it to the forum as an attachment, and let me look at the file.

I'd like to see if the issue is with the file, or with your system.

Also open the new 5-second segment in TMPGEnc, see if the segment behaves any different from the full file you tried last time.

[mlaviolette]

Entire file plays fine in VirtualDub. No sound on the mini sample with TMPGEnc Plus. Tried to upload a 5-second (22MB) sample but got "security token required" error, perhaps because it exceeded the 8MB size. I'll try tomorrow to get a 1 sec sample.

[mlaviolette]

I've attached a very short clip of our poodle sneezing.

[mlaviolette]

I just tried Cinema Craft Encoder Basic trial and have both video and audio using the original avi as input. What do you think of CCE Basic (assuming I can still buy it - it was discontinued last year)?

[mlaviolette]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mlaviolette

I just tried Cinema Craft Encoder Basic trial and have both video and audio using the original avi as input. What do you think of CCE Basic (assuming I can still buy it - it was discontinued last year)?

Never mind - I can't buy the Basic product and I won't shell out $2000 for the full one. But it did encode both the video and audio properly.

[admin]

The system I'm typing on has not been in heavy use for very long, and TMPGEnc Plus was only recently installed on it.

I opened your sample AVI file of the sneezing puppy, and then selected the default DVD (NTSC).mcf profile. It encoded to an new MPEG file -- complete with the audible sneeze -- in about 2 seconds. Attached it the new MPEG-2.

tmpg-mlavpuppy-main.jpg

You may want to look at your VFAPI plugin settings, under Options > Environmental Settings

You must be logged in to view this content; either login or register for the forum. The attached screen shots, before/after images, photos and graphics are created/posted for the benefit of site members. And you are invited to join our digital media community.

I bet your audio problem is because of something in there.

No, I wouldn't suggest CCE, and the Basic version was discontinued. Procoder discontinued it's "Express" version too. And then MainConcept discontinued some of its consumer software, too. It's really kind of crappy, fewer choices now than there was a few years ago.

[mlaviolette]

I tried moving DirectShow to the top - same result. I tried deinstalling/rebooting/reinstalling TMPGEnc, same result. Then I installed it on my second partition (same OS, less software installed) and it worked, so I must have a codec problem on the main partition. GSpot listed over 270 codecs, a dozen or so were audio codecs, so I'm guessing it would be difficult (ie impossible) to find out which one is causing the problem (unless you know a trick). Weird that Windows Media Player, VirtualDub and CCE Basic all play the audio while TMPGEnc does not. Is there a way to tell which audio codec TMPGEnc is using?

If I can't find the offending codec I could fire up my second partition to do the encoding, or I may be able to get a full, legitimate copy of Procoder 3 for between $190 and $250. Is it that much better an encoder for DV than the $37 TMPGEnc Plus? I read your review stating the encoded result is almost indistinguishable from the source while TMPGEnc was very good.

The lowest price I can find for Mainconcept is $460, not worth the money unless it's vastly superior to TMPGEnc Plus or Procoder.

I will probably be playing the DVDs I create on an HDTV, so the encode has to be of excellent quality.

[admin]

It's a codec issue, yes. You probably don't need anywhere near 270 codecs on your system. What comes with Windows, the XVID codec, Flash 10, and an MPEG-2 decoder are all you really need. System-wide codecs are a product of a now-gone era. Software such as VLC and GOM have player-embedded codec systems, so you no longer need computer-wide codecs installed.

Codec packs are notorious for installing too much conflicting crap, and making a system misbehave with audio and video files, both for playback and editing/encoding.

Look at removing some of the codecs with the freeware tool DXMan. Get it from http://www.analogx.com/contents/down...n/Freeware.htm

At this time, I don't feel comfortable saying Procoder is better than TMPGEnc Plus. My last tests with Procoder 3 were about 10 months ago, and I was very aggravated at bugs it had with FLV, H.264 and other non-DVD encoding. I did briefly test MPEG-2, but I don't remember it being better than MainConcept, nor was it terrible -- memory is a bit fuzzy on this. The goal of the test was for streaming work, and it failed miserably.

MainConcept Reference is vastly superior to TMPGEnc Plus and Procoder 1-2 (and probably 3), yes. It's available for $460 from the official site: http://esd.element5.com/affiliate.ht...mainconcept.de -- and I honestly would not buy it anywhere other than from that link (MainConcept themselves). Of course, that's not within everybody's budget. At the slowest encoding settings, TMPGEnc Plus can still do quite well.

That review of Procoder -- where was it? There are some reviews/pages on this site that need to still be updated.

[mlaviolette]

Quote:

Originally Posted by admin

That review of Procoder -- where was it? There are some reviews/pages on this site that need to still be updated.

It's in the Software Video Encoders section of http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/vid...de-convert.htm

Thanks for your help on this

[kpmedia]

Procoder 1.5 was indistinguishable.
Procoder 2.0 -- it depends on some things. It goes both ways.
Procoder 3 --- eh. It's at least still "very good" but I'm going to remove "indistinguishable" for now, until further tests can be made.

[mlaviolette]

Using GSpot to list the codecs on both partitions and a bit of a lucky guess I found the offending codec to be avisplitter.ax, part of the K-Lite Codec Pack. I used GSpot to un-register it and voila! TMPGEnc Plus now has sound. My next step is to compare TMPGEnc to MainConcept Reference.

[admin]

Uh-oh ... you said "codec pack". Those are one of the worst things you could put on a computer. Once upon a time, you needed a lot of system codecs to play videos, but we outgrew that some years ago. Software like VLC now has internal codecs to playback video. The only system-wide codecs you need are for editing (to read the source files).

Codec packs are poorly written, usually made by (and used, and popular with!) illegal downloaders of movies. Very often, the codecs conflict, and can entirely destroy a computer.

I've seen some bad codecs packs -- K-lite being the most infamous of them -- do so much damage that the computer had to be re-formatted and Windows re-installed. It just made a huge mess of things.

If you can uninstall that thing, do so.

Only add codecs you need, one by one. XVID is a good one to have, as well as lossless codecs like HuffYUV and HuffYUV-MT (multi-threaded).

The spelling-Nazi in me is so happy to see somebody use "voila" correctly -- so tired of seeing "walla" or some silly similar spelling.

[dyfan]

Quote:

happy to see somebody use "voila" correctly --

...Yeah, except that we are missing the accent grave that would be correctly present over the vowel "a": voilà.

[admin]

Yeah, but I hate doing the awkward ALT+ASCII# code thing, or having to pull up the charmap, change to the right font, and then copy/paste the goofy little character into the page. I do that for long-term site articles and guides, but not for the one-off forum posts. Writing these replies is already enough work!

I wish I had one of those extended keyboards from Europe -- some of those have a lot of extra chars. It would come in handy if/when I manually translate some pages in other languages I know.

[dyfan]

short cut:

à = lower case 'a' + 0-2-2-4.

But if you 'hate' it- no matter. You, I, mlaviolette and the cat knew what you meant, I suppose...?

Quote:

extended keyboards from Europe -- some of those have a lot of extra chars.

Yeah, that "alt+gr" key?? Cool!

[admin]

"Hate" because I didn't know the code.

à

Are you sure the accent is in the right direction?

When I used to write in Spanish regularly, I knew more of these. But that was such a long time ago, mostly for advanced college classes. Used to have a cheat-sheet, but that's long gone.

[dyfan]

...am a former French student (LONG time ago).

à:
Accent Grave- upper left to lower right, pronounced: 'Ack-sont Grahve'

á
Accent Acute- lower left to upper right, pronounced" 'Ack-sont A-coo'.

But...we digress and are admittedly off-topic!! We should be talking about an encoder, heh...