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Creating a Multichannel Audio SVCD
Super Video-CD 1.0 standard doesn't support Dolby Digital 5.1 but supports MPEG-2 multi-channel audio. This example is to make a SVCD with 5.1 digital audio. I am not sure you can find a good MPEG-2 audio multichannel player, except in Asia, but this example helps to understand better the digital audio and the MPEG-2 (SVCD) capabilities.
- Required tools
- Step 1: get an AC-3 file
- Step2: extract the 6 channels to WAV
- Step 3: convet channels to PCM
- Step 4: make a 6 channel AIFF
- Step 5: generate MPEG-2
- Step 6: multiplex MPEG audio and video
- Step 7: create a Super-VCD image
- Step 8: burn the SVCD
- Test if your system plays MPEG-2 multichannel audio
Required tools
The bad news - doing this requires Linux to generate the final multichannel MPEG-2 audio file. There is no getting around this. The program musicin is used to generate the final audio file and it only runs under Linux. You will need access to a Windows PC and a Linux PC to do this.
It is also important for you to be aware that SVCD does not support AC3 audio. This is probably because Philips wrote the spec for SVCD and their MPEG-2 multichannel audio competes with Dolby's AC3. This is a guide on how to create a compliant MPEG-2 multichannel audio file for SVCD.
Required software:
Sonic Foundry SoftEncode 1.0 to convert 5.1
AC3 audio to 5.1 WAV audio.
Edinburgh Speech Tools Library - needed for the ch_wave program to change the sampling rate of the individual audio channels from 48 to 44.1 KHz. There is a PC version available, but you are probably best off to download libraries and tools from Sven's page for Linux rather than trying to build it yourself. I guarantee you that you will not be able to build it on any platform from source without making serious modifications to the source code. You would be better off to just download the binaries.
Various Linux binaries from Sven's page - you will need:
- musicin (compilable under Windows, but doesn't work correctly except under Linux)
- pcm2aiff - converts WAV files to AIFF format so musicin can generate the final multichannel MPEG-2 audio file
I-Author Deluxe For Super VCD - it is the only program I am aware of that can multiplex a 5.1 multichannel audio file correctly. All other programs think it's a stereo MPEG-1 audio file. This is because multichannel MPEG-2 audio is encoded in a way to make it backwards compatible with MPEG-1 stereo audio. All the other tools I tried to multiplex with treated my 5.1 MPEG-2 audio file as a stereo MPEG-1 file.
Adaptec EZ CD Creator version 4.X. Required because I-Author generates a .CIF file as output. This is an image file that only EZ CD Creator understands. I have read that version 5.X does not understand the .CIF files that I-Author creates.
Sonic Foundry no longer makes SoftEncode. It is easily obtainable from various sites on the Internet.
VOB-Snoopy and Vob2audio to extract the AC3 file from your VOB file. Or you can create your own AC3 fiile with Minnetonka software like SurCode for Dolby Digital.
Step 1: get an AC-3 file
Extract the AC3 file from your VOB file. Various tools such as VOB-Snoopy and Vob2audio can be used.
Step2: extract the 6 channels to WAV
Start up SoftEncode. Load the extracted AC3 file in it. You will see six waveforms on your screen, one for each channel, if you successfully extracted the AC3 file from your VOB file.
Save the results as PCM-WAV:
Step 3: convert channels to PCM
Use the Edinburg Speech Library's ch_wave program to extract each audio channel to a separate file, also converting them to 44.1 KHz, which is what MPEG-2 multichannel audio requires. There is a Windows version of this tool available, but I did not test it. I know that it works correctly under Linux. Do the following 6 steps for each channel to convert them to 44.1 KHz PCM format:
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