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June 3, 2010 8:18 AM   Subscribe

How do I turn a noisy low volume DVD video into a flash movie?

I have a DVD in which the sound is practically inaudible due to low volume and background air conditioning noise. I would like to fix the sound and convert it to flv to put on a website. I know next to nothing about video or audio but imagine the process would be something like this:
1) Rip the dvd to some format (which?) (Using what software?)
2) Split the video and audio. (how? Using what software?)
3) "Enhance" the audio. (Using audacity? something else?)
4) Paste them back together. (How, what?)
5) Translate to flash. (etc.)
6) Maybe even recreate the DVD with the fixed video.

I have to do this on XP with a budget of zero but if there's something not too expensive that will help a lot, I'd like to hear about it.
posted by Obscure Reference to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)
 
Yeah, this can be done pretty easily with freeware tools. The basic procedure:

1) Rip the main movie to your hard drive with DVD Decrypter in IFO mode.
2) Index the movie and demux the audio stream with DGIndex.
3) Decode the audio from AC3 or PCM to WAV with eac3to, also fixing any reported delays.
4) Frameserve the index and fixed audio with Avisynth and do any necessary video filtering with built-in or plugin Avisynth filters.
5) Use ffmpeg to encode to whatever compatible audio and video formats in an FLV container. I guess the thing to do is VP6 or H.263 video and MP3 audio.

Be aware also that recent versions of Flash support H.264+AAC in MP4, which means when using x264 to encode video and Nero Digital to encode the audio you'll experience a massive jump in visual/aural quality at a given file size versus older Flash standards.

6) Put embedded content up with JW player or similar.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 8:36 AM on June 3, 2010


Oh, and on the audio front, take the fixed WAV from eac3to and do whatever you want in Audacity and then spit out the same 16-bit/48kHz WAV output.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 8:37 AM on June 3, 2010


Audacity has a noise removal feature that might reduce the air conditioner noise, once you get it that far:

1. Select a few seconds of just the background noise - no talking, and hopefully no other incidental noises (chairs scraping, coughs, etc).
2. Run Noise Removal from the Effects menu and click Get Noise Profile. It will look like nothing happens, but it's stored the characteristics of the background noise.
3. Select the whole track and run Noise Removal again. Now use the controls in the bottom half of the effect window.
4. If the noise is muted but the speech seems oddly distorted or mushy, try undoing and running Noise Removal at a lower Noise Reduction setting.
posted by echo target at 9:05 AM on June 3, 2010


Response by poster: Remembering that I know next to nothing about video or audio, I followed the good Inspector's instructions steps 1 and 2, I now have a bunch of files like:

06/03/2010 01:41 PM 12,288 VIDEO_TS.IFO
06/03/2010 01:41 PM 65,536 VIDEO_TS.VOB
06/03/2010 01:41 PM 12,288 VIDEO_TS.BUP
06/03/2010 01:49 PM 55,296 VTS_01_0.IFO
06/03/2010 01:55 PM 1,073,582,080 VTS_01_1.VOB
06/03/2010 01:58 PM 1,073,709,056 VTS_01_2.VOB
06/03/2010 01:59 PM 714,838,016 VTS_01_3.VOB
06/03/2010 01:47 PM 55,296 VTS_01_0.BUP
06/03/2010 01:59 PM 172 VTS_01 - Stream Information.txt
06/03/2010 03:41 PM 682,005 VIDEO_TS.d2v
06/03/2010 03:41 PM 2,625,831,488 VIDEO_TS.demuxed.m2v
06/03/2010 03:41 PM 154,476,544 VIDEO_TS T80 2_0ch 256Kbps DELAY 107ms.ac3

I figure the ac3 file must be the audio. (I figure this because step 3 describes the audio as an ac3 file)

Step 3 says I need to convert to wav and to fix the delays.
The site I downloaded eac3to from, says it will accept ac3 source and can produce wav output, so I'm on the right track. But I can't understand how to do this, nor how to fix the delay. Looking ahead, I can use echo target's instructions to fix the wav audio. but I know from past experience (researching previous questions like mine) that I can't find ffmpeg except as source and lack a compiler. I am hoping that I don't need to install the gnu C compiler to proceed.
posted by Obscure Reference at 1:49 PM on June 3, 2010


Response by poster: OK--am I right that giving an output file with a suffix .wav tells eac3to you want to conver to wav? But is that "DELAY 107ms" telling me I have to add such a delay? Or that I need to remove one?
posted by Obscure Reference at 6:48 PM on June 3, 2010


eac3to somefile.ac3 somefile.wav -107ms should get you where you need to go.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 7:09 AM on June 6, 2010


Alternately, since you have stereo audio, you can make your D2V project with the option "Decode AC3 to WAV" enabled and wind up with audio with the delay automagically corrected to zero.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 10:58 AM on June 6, 2010


Response by poster: I have the edited wave files but am finding it impossible to recombine them. ffmpeg gives me error messages that are beyond the scope of my understanding. There's got to be a less complicated way of combining a m2v video and a .wav file!
posted by Obscure Reference at 7:14 AM on June 9, 2010


You don't need to output to wavs, just one wav is fine.

leave the "s" off your command line, or do the decoding to WAV with DGIndex.

And you shouldn't be using ffmpeg merely to remux or recombine: ffmpeg is your encoder to the flash format. Also, you're better off serving it with Avisynth than directly because then you can more easily do operations like cropping, resizing, and deinterlacing.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 4:37 PM on June 11, 2010


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