how do you know if a DVD is in stereo

[chunga1]

hoe can you tell if your DVD is in Stereo or MONO????? this guys wants me to check for a stereo version fo a certain DVD..

thank's

[pawel]

If you can't hear it then the only way is to extract audio and visually compare channels difference in an audio prog. I'd not trust automatic verification as for example tape noise may give false result.

[direwolf-pgh]

normally I would wait for Lynne to answer this one..

but Im thinking she would say.. use G-Spot

http://www.headbands.com/gspot/download.html

[chunga1]

i just tried that gspot but it didn't tell me if it was stereo or mono///

[paddington]

If you have WinDVD, you can start playing one of the bigger VOB files (not the menu or something) and right click on the video image while it plays, choose SETUP... and then the INFORMATION tab. The audio section will show something like this:

Audio:
Hardware:
Audio Device: directsound
S/PDIF: Present
Number of speakers: 2
Stream:
Type: Dolby Digital (AC3)
Bitrate: 448 Kbps
Number of main channels: 2
LFE Channel: None
Sampling Frequency: 48khz
Bits Per Sample: 16
Output:
Sample Rate: 48 KHz
Bits per Sample: 16



The 2 main channels indicates this is probably stereo - however it only means they ENCODED it with 2 separate channels. It is still possible that the source audio is mono and just copied to both channels equally,.

In other words, you can't be positive, but you can check for the number of main channels and then listen to see if you hear different things in each channel to verify.

[U2Lynne]

normally I would wait for Lynne to answer this one..

but Im thinking she would say.. use G-Spot

http://www.headbands.com/gspot/download.html
Nope, Lynne doesn't touch PC video stuff. :)

[Five]

I was thinking that gspot would do it

I'm not too expert in DVD matters

if you can manage to extract some audio from the DVD and post up a little sample to rapidshare or similar I can take a look at it here to tell you if its stereo or mono (or even mono captured as stereo but slightly imbalanced).

you could also listen to it on headphones, if there's some part where something is obviously coming from the right or left only then its gotta be stereo.

hopefully some of the heavyweight video guys will stumble in here with an easier method.

[musik_maniak]

Yes, as Five says, you can listen to it on headphones, and if you have a "mono" switch on your stereo amplifier, you can switch that "on" and "off" as you listen, and see if you hear a difference. If nothing changes as you switch back and forth, then it's mono (and it's good mono at that, because if it's unbalanced mono, you'll notice the sound moving from left to right, but it still won't be stereo).
So if you hear a change as you switch from "stereo" to "mono", listen to the individual instruments in the mix, and if the different instruments move to different places in the stereo spectrum (left and right) then it's really stereo, but if the whole mix just moves left or right then it's likely unbalanced mono (which really sucks, by the way).