Mpeg and AC3 audio

[aznation]

I have two types of movie files on my computer.
1. movies ripped as divx .avi ....these playback great
2. movies ripped as one large vob with dvd decrypter, which I have renamed as '.mpg' files. These work fine in my windows environment but won't playback sound within GBPVR program.

I'm sure I'm just missing something really obvious because it seems like these use to work for me a few months ago...(we just moved 2 months ago and I'm going through the process of trying to reset my HTPC)

My motherboard uses Nvidia nforce2 chipset and integrated realtek audio with SPDIF out. Video decoder's available are cyberlink (good version that supports vmr and spdif 5.1 channel out) as well as nvidia player and whatever the stock xp player is.

I have no problem watching (and listening) to recordings which are also mpegs but I can't understand why the ripped movie files don't have sound.
Help.......

[sub]

What do you have the audio decoder set to?

Some people have had to install a filter like AC3Filter to get AC3 sound working.

[capone]

I had that HW and used both AC# and FFDshow...just having the mpeg isn't enough when the sound is encoded w/ AC# (to get the multiple channels).

You can test w/ GSpot, and see what the audio is encoded as (free app...google it).

[aznation]

Sub,

for clarification the settings that I should try messing with will be under the "playback" options and "mpeg-2 playback" options correct?

If so, they are all set to 'system default'

my choices are:
system default
mpeg2 audio decoder
Nvidia audio decoder
Cyberlink audio decoder
Intervideo Non CSS audio decoder

I just tried all of them one at a time and still get no audio when playing an mpeg with the original ac3 track.

What about the 'audio renderer' options? I'll try those next.

Dang, these all seemed to work before.....I wonder what I did. Anybody experience problems after installing Nvidia player?

[aznation]

OK, I found a combination that works.

I set my audio decoder to cyberlink and my audio renderer to the Realtek AC97.

Don't know why but this is the only combination that gives me audio.

[capone]

You can great some great sound out of it. Search the fourms for ac3

[GoodGuys]

I got a question for you that might sound like asking the obvious, so please don't flame if I am missing something here:

If you ripped a DVD into a set of .VOB files, why not play it like a DVD? I use the My Videos plugin, which recognizes directories that have VIDEO_TS sub-dir and treat it like a DVD, which is nice, I think.

Or did you rip it to a single file?

GGF

[capone]

You can get that to work I believe. The only reason not to is the size of the files. It's possible to reencode the VOB and keep the quailty and the multi-channel sound, and at < 800Mb.

I don't have a guide for the best way to do this, but I've followed others in the past to great effect. http://www.videohelp.com/ is a great resource for guides and info.

[Jeff]

Are you playing back on a PC or an MVP? If it is the later, you need to convert the audio track from ac3 to mp2 format. The Video Archive plug-in provides a dvd2mpeg funciton that dos the conversion.

Jeff