[Rob Babcock]

My brother & I messed around with making a DVD of music, and used Be Sweet to transcode 44.1 kh Redbook to 48 kz and recorded it as a slide show.  This works well as you need only one JPEG, which takes almost no disc space at all.  This allows 3 or 4 hrs of (probably) full quality CD sound on a DVD.

The downsides?  Well, my brother chose as the musical subject 3 hrs of dogshit sounding 15 year old hairmetal CDs.  A headscratcher indeed, the actual CDs sound pretty shitty, so it's very hard to tell if the sampling rate converter is very transparent.

The other problem is that, at least with the software we tried, you can't precisely tie the time of the "slide" with the duration of the song.  It can be done to within a few tenths of a second, but over a couple of hours of music it starts to get further and further off.  Now, this works just fine if you're just listening, but if you go to skip tracks some song may get clipped.

Still, it shows it can be done.  There are some other options I'm looking at.  I'll report back as I learn more.

[dwk]

Thanks for the update - this is something I might be interested in trying. A couple thoughts

- I believe that BeSweet uses the 'ssrc' package from shibatch.sourceforge.net. As far as I can determine, if ssrc is used in double-precision floating point mode, it is pretty much as good as it gets for sample-rate-conversion.  This process shouldn't degrade the sound too much. Keeping 24 bits on the output word would have made it essentially perfect.
- I'm not familiar with the dvd spec so there may be other limitations, but ~4gig of lpcm should allow 5-6 hours just based on the data size@16/48 - did you actually run into a limit at 3 hrs.
- on the timing problem - is this due to having to pad 'tracks' up to a certain number of bytes? if so, it should be relatively easy to tweak the resampling process to pad up to the appropriate boundary to be able to accurately sync the tracks.

[Rob Babcock]

The solution turned out to be doing video as opposed to a slide show.  By using a frame of black and telling the software it's moving video, you get a black background that takes almost no data to produce.

BeSweet does a spectacular job of transcoding.  However, the new version of Nero 6 will do this as you rip songs to the HD.  It does the job equally well and saves time.

As far as SQ goes, the "DVD-M's", as I call them, sound at least as good as the original track.  For reasons I can't explain, some things sound better than the original.  Maybe this occurs for the same reason that some people purport that a CD-R sounds better than the original...I can't speculate too much at this point.  But suffice it to say, it sounds good and holds a lot of music (looks like 3 or 4 hours).

[Hantra]

Rob:

Are you aware of a way to rip two channels of audio off a DVD?  I have tried BeSweet, and some others, and haven't been able to do it. .

[Rob Babcock]

Hmmm...not sure how to do that.  Maybe I'll nose around this weekend and see if I can figure something out.