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Old 2007-12-08, 03:54 PM
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Dudogger Dudogger is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Over the Happy Mountain
Question MPEG-2 to DVD Question

Some time back, I received a DVD-R in trade which contained 7 .mpg files corresponding to the 7 episodes of the Transatlantic Sessions 2 series broadcast by BBC4 in 1998. I have no lineage info to speak of, but I used TMPGEnc DVD Author 3 to: a) merge the 7 individual .mpgs into a single, 3-hour DVD video; b) add chapter points for the 46 tracks; and c) create LPCM audio in the final product. It was left in its original PAL format, and the resulting VIDEO_TS folder is 5.98 GB in size. I also noticed that the average bitrate for the newly-created video is only 2877 kb/s, even though the audio/video quality seem very clean and crisp. I suspect this was some kind of a digital capture of a more recent rebroadcast of these shows, in consideration of its quality and apparent absence of VHS artifacts.

Therefore, my questions are as follows:

1) If I reauthor the originals again to AC3, the resulting video would become a dvd5. In that this is coming from MPEG-2 files (of unknown source and unknown past manipulation), was there even any reason to go LPCM to begin with? Has the audio not already been rendered lossy, and therefore, going with AC3 on this new video would actually provide the same audio quality while allowing for it to be burned to a single-layer disc?

2) Is the low bitrate suggestive of past re-encoding, etc., or was that merely the typical result of recording these shows as .mpgs to begin with?

3) Is there anything I've mentioned in the above inquiry that would preclude this fine video from being uploaded at TTD, particularly if I were to reauthor it to AC3 to make it's size more appealing to downloaders? I've not found this series for download anywhere else, and it would seem like a very nice one to put up (Jerry Douglas, Aly Bain, Ricky Skaggs, etc., in top form), if possible.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions/advice on this!

P.S. - If anyone knows where to find torrents for either Transatlantic Sessions 1 (~1996) or 3 (~2007), please reply!
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