Steve Franks wrote: > > > > What bothers me the most about this whole discussion is that I > > NEVER see desync when I rip dvd to avi, and I do nothing special > > to keep it in sync... In fact, I almost always just copy the dvd > > ac3 audio into the avi container. I really wonder what you folks > > are doing that is mucking it up. I assure you, it doesn't happen > > unless you make it happen by choosing some wrong setting. > > > > Well, I think you've nailed the issue: "I almost always just copy the dvd > ac3 audio into the avi container". All my problems are when I've tried to > mp3 the audio, which seemed like a reasonable idea to a newbie, and worked > until sometime in the last 6 months.
It has always been a mystery to me why otherwise sane folks convert ac3 into mp3 when they rip dvd's. I only ever do it if I am changing the speed of the video (for example, from 25 fps to 24 fps), and therefore have to do the same to the sound. Another thing that people should be doing, but often are not, is cropping when transcoding from dvd... If you don't crop, you wind up encoding the transition from the video content to the black bars, which always produces ringing artifacts and eats up a significant part of your bitrate (since NO frames will be identical, bits will be wasted in EVERY frame). Note that many commercial dvd's exhibit these ringing artifacts as well, because commercial dvd's are often "remastered" to death, using "professional" encoding tools that cost thousands of dollars and that are total crap ;^) On the other hand, when you transcode back from avi to dvd, for example, *adding* black bars does NOT waste bits, because the bars are not part of the transcoded content. In fact, they save bits, because if you do things right, you aren't wasting bits encoding into the overscan area.
