Does the AC3 and/or DVD Video standard support mono audio tracks?
 

All of my VHS and Betamax source videos have mono audio tracks. From a compression standpoint, it would be better to keep them as mono on the DVD instead of compressing a "twin mono" stereo track. Does the AC3 and DVD Video standard support a mono audio track? How would one encode a mono WAV file with the TMPGEnc AC3 encoder as a mono AC3 audio track?

OK, seems that I answered my own question. I happened to have Apple's A.Pack Encoder on my Powerbook G4, which I didn't even know existed until tonight. Seems that one would encode mono audio using the "1/0: Center" profile. Hopefully that plays sound on all speakers on a set top DVD player and not just through the center channel!

Yes, I believe this is in the official spec. However, how well it works may largely depend on the software used to encode and author, as well as the DVD player hardware or software for playback. Something to keep in mind!

A.Pack Encoder came with either DVD Studio Pro or Final Cut Pro in earlier versions. I have that, too. Mine came with DVDSP v1.x about 8 years ago. (Wow, have I really been making DVDs for this long?)

I would suggest stereo 2/0 AC3, personally. What would be the need to encode as 1/0 mono, anyway? I'm curious.

It just seems wasteful to encode a dual mono stereo track. I suppose it won't take up much more space though, hopefully the encoder is good at looking at the difference between the left and right tracks.

As I suspected, encoding as "1/0: Center" results in playing out of the center channel only on a DD5.1 decoder. So 2/0 dual track mono it is.