March 31, 2004

Curious George: DVDR Help! DVDr problem.

I have authored several DVDs that work fine on home players, but for some reason they do not play audio on my own computer. This seems pretty bizarre to me for several reasons: The source files are all mpeg-1 VCD files, which play fine. Playing the .VOB files from the Video_TS folder works, burning them to a VCD makes a playable CD that has proper audio, and my DVD player plays everything else normally. Anyone else had anything like this? Like I said, the source files are already VCD, Im using Tmpgen DVD Author for the Image, Nero for the actual burning, and Media Player classic to play the DVDs, though I have tried other (less favorable) players with the same results. Again, it works fine on component DVD players. The video and menus all function correctly, just no audio. I am pretty tech savvy, so something this esoteric is driving me nuts. I have checked DVDrhelp.com and I couldnt find anything like this, though it is a bit hard to find what you want through there sometimes. This is a last resort for me. Any takers?

posted by lkc 20 years ago
  • Ack! It left out the Curious George. Sorry! *kaff*kaff*now if only we could edit our posts...
  • Just because I care, lkc. I asked the hubby, who knows more about these things than I do, and his best guess was that you're missing the audio codec -- it's unusual because normally you'd hear the audio and not get the video, so yeah.
  • if tracicle's suggestion does not pan out, I'd check to see that commercial DVDs play ok in your drive. My suspicion is that you don't have digital audio enabled on the drive, and you don't have an audio cable going from the sound card to the DVD player.
  • if it makes you feel any better, i have the opposite problem - can't get any video on an mpeg4 in anything other than sucky, invasive media players on my system. i have winamp as my default player for pretty much everything (media player classic for web plug-ins) and it handles everything beautifully, after dropping in a codec or two as needed. but it won't give me mpeg4 video. just audio. and apparently nobody out there has a codec that will enable it. (well, nowhere that i've been able to find on google, anyway.) so, for the help of all, if anybody knows of a good, easy-to-understand and easy-to-navigate audio/video codec reservoir, please spill.
  • free-codecs.com or codecsdownload.com might work. i'm sure there are better sites... this was the only one i could find in my bookmarks, however.
  • boo_radley: I think you might have hit the nail on the head. For reference: commercial DVDs play fine, I have the k-lite mega-codec pack 1.0 (which includes real and quicktime alt, as well as the standard codecs). However, for audio I use a fancy-shmancy mLan mixer, which is an outboard piece of equipment, and pipes several channels through a firewire cable, there is no analog line running from the drive to a soundcard because my soundcard is disabled. Like I said, VCDs and the image play fine, but I will check the audio options to see if there is some other possibility I am missing. Thanks for the suggestions, everyone! (i would strongly recommend the K-lite Mega Codec pack to anyone who doesnt have it already, it is very current and has just about everything you could want, it is also better than many other packs I have tried, and an improvement over their own pack).