Is there a DTS audio speedup app?

[manthing]

i have a DTS audio for a film.
it is from a NTSC dvd.
so the audio "length" is the NTSC run time of the movie.

i want to use the DTS audio in the PAL version of the same movie.
as some of you know, there is a 4% speedup between NTSC and PAL.

so i need an app that will "speedup" the DTS audio so that it matches the run time of the PAL movie.

are there any apps that will do this for me?
something that won't destroy the original DTS too much in conversion.

thanks.

[lordsmurf]

For DTS directly, no, I don't believe so.
But via conversion to others formats, yes. (If needed, it can be converted back to DTS.)

Do it really need to be left as DTS?
I'll also assume this is multi-channel audio, and not simple stereo? (That makes it more complicated.)

The 4% speedup only applies when there was a film speedup. PAL to NTSC is not necessarily faster/slower. It fully depends on the conversion method used. The speed differences happens because 24p (23.976fps NTSC) is sped up to 25p (25fps PAL), and audio both adjusted in speed AND in pitch to compensate. Over the course of a movie, that only adds up to a couple of minutes.

[manthing]

yeah, it is a multi-channel audio.

i suppose i could change it to 5.1 AC3 or something?
would i lose quality by changing from DTS to AC3?
what is the best & simplest app to use to do this?

i know eac3to.
will that do the job?

by the way, when i initially used eac3to to "speedup" the DTS audio file, eac3to complained i did not have a DTS encoder installed on my system.

where / how can i get a DTS encoder?

[lordsmurf]

DTS has a different (wider) dynamic range compared to Dolby Digital. Personally, I don't like DTS anyway, as speech is too quiet, and I have to turn up the volume to hear what's going on, and then a music or some action (explosion, car chase, whatever) will about destroy my speakers a few seconds later because it's overly loud. It's an aggravation to have to keep a remote in your hands at all times, to avoid going deaf or blowing your cones out. Wider dynamic range is artificial and unnatural.

PCM, AC3 (Dolby) and even MPEG Layer II is better for hearing. Audiophiles will probably disagree, but many of them are divorced from reality anyway -- they hear what they want to hear.

I would convert it to 5.1 WAV, split it to 6 WAV files, and then augment the WAV files, one channel at a time. Then convert it back to AC3 (Dolby Digital), in proper channel placement. Converting to DTS requires high end pro software (the homebrew encoders are junk), so it's really not an easy task.

I have software that is long discontinued, including A.Pack for Mac (came with DVD Studio Pro 1.x) and Sonic Foundry Soft Encode for Windows XP, that I use for infrequent AC3 5.1 audio work. Almost all video sources I handle are 2/0 stereo sourced. Surcode has a DTS encoder, as a plugin for professional software like Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, Pro Tools and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge.

For the actual time expansion (or "speed up") of the audio, use Goldwave. It has a very precise conversion tool that can use SMTPE timecodes (hour:minutes:seconds:frames), as opposed to typical percentage-based time filters.

I find eac3to to be useless to date.