Sound late

[Hans-Georg Michna]

When I convert an MPEG-2 television recording to WMV format, the
audio slowly drifts away over the course of the movie. At the
end of a two-hour recording the sound is quite a few seconds
late.

Needless to say, video and sound are perfectly synchronous in
the original MPEG-2 file.

Is there any workaround for this defect in Movie Maker?

I'd also be curious about how this is possible at all. Few
things could be simpler than keeping video and sound
synchronous. Just give the two streams some occasional sync or
time stamps and have all processing programs realign them there.

Hans-Georg

 

[Guest]

I had the same problem with an AVI file and found the answer to be how I
created the file. When I created the AVI in Nero I set the audio to be a
variable bit rate. I created the file again using a constant bit rate for the
audio and the problem went away.

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

I had the same problem with an AVI file and found the answer to be how I
created the file. When I created the AVI in Nero I set the audio to be a
variable bit rate. I created the file again using a constant bit rate for the
audio and the problem went away.

Thanks for the hint! Crazy software!

I hadn't even thought of using Nero, but I'll try that too now.
What exactly did you use? Nero Recode, my next test, doesn't
allow me to choose such sound settings.

Hans-Georg

 

[Guest]

It was when I captured my video from my camera to my computer using Nero.
It's so long now I don't remember how I did. I also remember using Pinnacle
to capture a video and had the same problem the sound slowly getting out of
sync. I recaptured the video and choose a constant bit rate for audio and
video and the problem was going

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

Have meanwhile tried Nero Recode, and it works perfectly. Thanks
again for the hint.

The achievable compressions aren't as high as I hoped though.
The original recording came from DVB-T, which is already highly
compressed and often already comes with a meager data rate of
around 2 Mbit/s. So even when going from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 the
gains are limited.

I may end up leaving the stuff as MPEG-2 and doing nothing.

Hans-Georg

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

When I convert an MPEG-2 television recording to WMV format, the
audio slowly drifts away over the course of the movie. At the
end of a two-hour recording the sound is quite a few seconds
late.

Needless to say, video and sound are perfectly synchronous in
the original MPEG-2 file.

Is there any workaround for this defect in Movie Maker?

I'd also be curious about how this is possible at all. Few
things could be simpler than keeping video and sound
synchronous. Just give the two streams some occasional sync or
time stamps and have all processing programs realign them there.

Just wanted to report that I've found a solution. Instead of
Movie Maker I used Windows Media Encoder, which is a much more
powerful, little quirky, program. It encoded the problem file in
two passes, using both processor cores and still needing several
hours, i.e. many times more than Movie Maker.

But the compression is excellent and impressive. I re-encoded an
1.91 GB DVB-T recording (MPEG-2) and got a 720 MB WMV file with
incredibly good quality (no noticeable artefacts over and above
what was already there). Most remarkably, and this was the
solution to my problem, sound and video was still perfectly
synchronous.

Windows Media Encoder is extremely unresponsive when connected
with a lengthy input file, so you have to wait for up to a
minute until you can click on anything and set it up, but it
does the job.

Hans-Georg