ok i need help 3 weeks and no joy. i tried joining 2 mpeg 2 files and the result is always the same no matter what i use i tried tmpgenc i tried womble i tried ulead dvd factory wasy joiner etc etc etc and either go out of sync or are in sync but sound vanishes half way through file one and returns start of file 2 i am at the end of my rope anyone any ideas?


cheers

nik

I hate to state the obvious but...

Q: ...have you checked the source files that the sound it there all the way through?

Q: also are the 2 files using identical parameters like resolution, audio sampling rate, data rate (Less important).

Q: Is the audio in sync on the parts where there IS audio. Watch for at least 10 min before deciding as sync issues can be hard to detect.

Q: Is the silent video parts looking good?? No jerkyness? Again watch a while before deciding (unless its real bad).

Q: Is there any other program that might interrupt WOMBLE and freeze the codec? Most audio codecs have trouble when 2 different programs try to use them.
Even surfing the web might do it if you goto a sight with sound. Certainly doing any other editting while womble is working might break it. Sometimes getting an email will "ring" a sound. Disable all windows sounds to be safe.

Why edit in MPEG2. It's notorious for sync problems and you have limited software that will do a good job.

If you're trying to get VHS video to MPEG2, I suggest you capture to segmented AVI first. Edit this video within the AVI format using Virtualdub if you have VfWdrivers. Once you have all the sections you don't need removed, you can resave the file and then convert over to MPEG2 using TMPGEnc or similar software using variable bit encoding. It's a bit more steps but the quality will be there.

Yeah, I've heard that old saw bones before. "Don't
edit MPEG-2. All the editors suck! It's impossible
to have sync sound..." blah blah blah. Crap. Womble is
an excellent product. It has a feature in the mux where
you can move the sound forwards or backwards and you can
fix almost all sync problems that way. How you use
Womble can also introduce sync problems into the mix.
What you have to do is cut the video you want out and
put it on the clipboard and put those together. If you
simply try to remove what you don't want from a file
using Womble, you will often have sync issues. Besides,
if the source has problems, conversion to AVI won't fix
that and then you have to convert back again to MPEG-2.
That's an awful lot of work and possible loss of quality
in doing another MPEG-2 conversion when it's easy enough
to make Womble work correctly and do what you want.

I prefer M2-Edit Pro when joining mpeg2 files. But I also use Womble to fix broken files because it has a nice tool MPEG GOP fixer. So what I do is following:

1) Join the files with M2-Edit PRO
2) Run the joined file through the Womble GOP fixer, it correct timecode and audio PTS errors and also make sure it is DVD compliant GOP.

Sometimes I also take step 2) on the unjoined files before joining them just to be sure they are OK. And if that's not good enough I start with demuxing and remuxing the files before fixing and joining them...

I also seen some cases where video and audio is not is synch when playing on the computer but OK after making DVD and playing on the standalone player. It was caused by the ATI File player, but after installing PowerDVD it played correctly in PowerDVD. So it can be a little bit tricky to find where it goes wrong...

Ronny