I just issued this command: mplex -f 8 -o final.mpg shrinked.m2v movie.ac3 and this is what it returns...

" INFO: [mplex] mplex version 1.6.2 (2.2.3 $Date: 2004/01/13 20:45:26 $)
INFO: [mplex] File shrinked.m2v looks like an MPEG Video stream.
INFO: [mplex] File exorcist.ac3 looks like an AC3 Audio stream.
INFO: [mplex] Video stream 0: profile 8 selected - ignoring non-standard options!
INFO: [mplex] Found 1 audio streams and 1 video streams
INFO: [mplex] Selecting dvdauthor DVD output profile
INFO: [mplex] Multiplexing video program stream!
INFO: [mplex] Scanning for header info: Video stream e0 (shrinked.m2v)
INFO: [mplex] VIDEO STREAM: e0
INFO: [mplex] Frame width : 720
INFO: [mplex] Frame height : 480
INFO: [mplex] Aspect ratio : 16:9 display
INFO: [mplex] Picture rate : 29.970 frames/sec
INFO: [mplex] Bit rate : 8153200 bits/sec
INFO: [mplex] Vbv buffer size : 229376 bytes
INFO: [mplex] CSPF : 0
INFO: [mplex] Scanning for header info: AC3 Audio stream 00 (movie.ac3)
INFO: [mplex] AC3 frame size = 1792

INFO: [mplex] AC3 AUDIO STREAM:
INFO: [mplex] Bit rate : 57344 bytes/sec (448 kbit/sec)
INFO: [mplex] Frequency : 48000 Hz
INFO: [mplex] SYSTEMS/PROGRAM stream:
INFO: [mplex] rough-guess multiplexed stream data rate : 8789696
INFO: [mplex] target data-rate specified : 10080000
INFO: [mplex] Setting specified specified data rate: 10080000
INFO: [mplex] Run-in Sectors = 89 Video delay = 13019 Audio delay = 16022
INFO: [mplex] New sequence commences...
INFO: [mplex] Video e0: buf= 237568 frame=000000 sector=00000000
INFO: [mplex] Audio bd: buf= 16384 frame=000000 sector=00000000
INFO: [mplex] Scanned to end AU 164220
INFO: [mplex] Running out...
INFO: [mplex] Video e0: buf= 212355 frame=164220 sector=01852600
INFO: [mplex] Audio bd: buf= 1155 frame=212872 sector=00189220
**ERROR: [mplex] Need to split output but there appears to be no %d in the filename pattern final.mpg


Any ideas on how i can fix this? Thanks!

Try this:

mplex -f 8 -o final%d.mpg shrinked.m2v movie.ac3

You will find that you get more than 1 mpg as a result, in my experience you can generally either disregard the smaller or cat the two resulting files together.

Thats a bit of a bodge, so if anyone knows of a better solution I'd like to hear it!

Cheers

HE

Well I did that very thing on a different box before and it yielded about 100 little mpeg files until it finally gave up with an error.

When I put %d in it reexpands the the multiplexed movie back to its original size in the form of a few *mpg files and a slew of other *mpgs which have nothing in them. Originally movie existed as 22 titles so I had to take the *vob of every single title and cat them into one *vob.

I had a DVD9 movie that ripped with dvdrip giving 11 titles with various different chapters under the titles. Title 3,4,5 were pcm and the others were ac3. Is this a bug or the people that made the movie are hackers? Well, I am doing each Title(001,002,003, etc...) individually and I am going to put them in a dvdauthor.xml file as individual *.mpg files so the movie plays without any menu or chapters using a shrink factor of 2.4 because my initial cat *.vob>vob and soundtrack length gave me this value, but inevitably I will probably have to use Nautilus to add all the sizes over and over to get it all to fit with bigger shrink factors. The %d trick will reexpand into mpg files, but you have to reorder them by playing each one with mplayer to get the right order for the dvdauthor.xml file so I am going to try just listing each shrunk and mplexed mpg from each title to skip the confusion. Here is the pcm trick:

tcextract -i movie.vob -t vob -x mpeg2 > movie.m2v

mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc dummy -ao pcm -hardframedrop -aofile movie.lpcm movie.vob

ffmpeg -i movie.lpcm -acodec ac3 -ac 2 -ab 192 movie..ac3

tcrequant -i movie.m2v -o shrinked.m2v -f 1.5

mplex -f 8 -o final.mpg shrinked.m2v movie.ac3

Now it plays with mplayer. Initially I got pcm files that were supposed to be wav? and I could play them with mplayer, but mplex would not sync the video with the sound so I converted back to ac3. I new I was going to figure this out because I was initially byte-swapping with transcode -d and still got hiss like I did when I first posted and did not byte-swap; however, I was able to make pcm files that I could hear with mplayer and still got only a scratch(actual audio sound)...silence...scratch(actual audio sound)...silence...scratch(actual audio sound)...silence sound after multiplexing them which was also another thing that happened on my first pcm audio dvd burn attempt.

References
SYS3175 Converting a DivX to a DVD using Linux(solved my problem)
Doom9's Forum - Audio FAQ: Dolby Digital/AC3 FAQ by KpeX
LinuxQuestions.org: DVD9 to DVD5 Guide by Steel_J
Bloggy Sat, Dec18 2004 Digital Video to DVD encoding under Linux
Transcode: Search for: pcm
Re: (clug-talk) Converting MPEGS
[transcode-users] Re: PCM audio problem
VideoDVD Backup -SlugBug
DVDAuthor documentation for dvdauthor.xml file for one chapter, two sources



I used the following to burn a list of shrunk mpg files taken from SlugBug:

dvdauthor -o /some*other*outputdir/ -x /path/to/xmlfile -T

growisofs -speed=4 -Z /dev/dvd -V TITLE_VOLUME -dvd-video /some*other*outputdir/

I used mpg files instead of vob files.

Well when I got to the titles with the largest size, ie. "the movie", no method of audio extraction would produce an uncorrupted file that could be mplexed, but I could listen to the files with axel thims mplayer rpm which used an mmx optimized resampler and they were good. So it only worked with small files with only a thousand or so frames in them. By now I have figured out how to compile every single program except mplayer out of cvs with gcc4 so my system is fried. Back to vcr tape. Linux can't do a 120min movie. Oh, wait a minute, using ffmpeg to convert the so called good ac3 from cvs built tcextract to an ac3 using ffmpeg command line similar to above and ac3 codec failed because codec was no good and ffmpeg was from axel thim, so I uninstalled libpostproc and ffmpeg rpms and got ffmpeg cvs to work with mmx turned off since only sse works now and I also installed my cvs a52dec. Now were good again and these commands work for ac3(sic):

tcextract -i *vob -a 0 -t vob -x ac3 > movie.ac3
ffmpeg -i movie.ac3 -acodec ac3 -ac 2 -ab 192 output.ac3
mplex -f 8 -S 0 -o final%d.mpg shrinked.m2v output.ac3

The -S 0 is supposed to be for files over 2G. The ac3 that my cvs tcextract extracts has " *** Error: Expected chunk 'RIFF', found '<K\uffff'" at the end when I use tcscan -i on it and maybe thats ok but it won't play with mplayer. Now because of the way I compiled ffmpeg, which is really any which way you can, I can no longer play my ac3 files as it tries to use libdv raw on the ffmpeg converted file and all I see is colored squares. Mplayer--which is axel thim's since I still can't compile mplayer-- says I have an unknown audio format, but the resultant mplexed mpg plays with alsa and it is ac3 so it works. All I can say is it is going to take anybody that still can't shrink a dvd9 to a dvd5 the way they want to do it a very long time to figure out some way to do it which last about as long as the daily yum update does. I have made some progress though because if every thing is reasonably sane I can use lxdvdrip and it will say my dvd is smaller than 4.7G and ask me if I want to use dvdbackup after which I answer yes and dvdbackup makes a perfect copy of my dvd menus and all. DVD9 is the problem.