NOTICE: This tutorial was made by using VideoLan 0.x. Where to find the transcode / stream options in VideoLan has changed, the principle has remained the same. I personally can’t get the transcode options to work for me anymore with the latest version, but that may be related to the files I’ve attempted to load.

For those of you that have attempted to convert HD video before and didn’t succeed, this guide is for you. The problem with HD is not necessarily the video, but the audio track. Unless you have specific mp4 audio codecs installed, it’s likely you’ll only get sound from an HD video if you play it back by VideoLan. While HD video is high quality, it is not necessarily the favorite format to save video because the space it requires is huge. In my opinion HD is overkill for the random clips you gather here and there. This is why I felt the urge to take HD apart, and give you a way to make a better space/quality ratio.

How to get the audio
There actually is a very simple way to get the audio track off an HD video file. Since VideoLan is the only player that will play the audio, it also contains the answer to how you can get the audio track isolated as a seperate file on disk. In VideoLan we will use the Stream/Save option to do this.

When you open settings, you will have to set the following properties:

Check your output file with your mp3 player. If it has stops and clicks, check it again. With these settings in VideoLan it should be ok. Now you will need an MP3 to WAV converter. For this I will use my Winamp Disk Writer plugin. It can be found in Options -> Preferences -> Plugins -> Output.

How to join video and your wav file
HD is actually MPEG-2. So you will need to Demultiplex the video first. Demultiplexing is isolating the video and audio tracks. Every program I tried did not demultiplex the audio properly, only VideoLan. TMPGEnc is a good Multiplexing/Demultiplexing tool. Open your HD video file in the Multiplexing / Demultiplexing tool. As you can see the audio track remains empty, this is because the audio is not recognized.

So now we’re left with one audio WAV file and an M2V file. TMPGEnc is able to Multiplex these back together. I would recommend a full new save to any format you’d like. In the following screenshots I will show you the settings for XVID output/ MP3. Just be sure to set the output to “Progressive” instead of “Interlaced”. This will leave horizontal lines. Deinterlacing them later on will give trouble.

Tags: hd, mp3, mp4, mp4a, mp4aac, mpeg-4, videolan, wav, xvid

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Conversion, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.