I followed Chickenman's guide to converting Divx to SVCD to the letter, and then put it to convert on an old Pentium II which took 34 hours to complete. After buring the SVCD (as per instructions) I found the picture played well but there is no sound on either the PC or home DVD player. The properties tag confirms that the file has audio. Where did I go wrong?

Thanks for any tips

In the folder that made the SVCD for you, there should be a *.AC3 or a *.MPA file (the original sound track ). Also should be a *.MPA file, which was converted form the original sound track. There may be a *.WAV file also.

The *.MPA file should be approx 120 to 200 meg long. Is that so? If you double click on this file does it play?

I do indeed have a 94Mb .ac3 file as part of a long list of files. If I double click it I get the query screen about which program do I want play it.

As far as I can tell there are no .mpa files in the folder which is dedicated to this.

Any advise would be appreciated.

Thanks

Okay, then you need to install BeSweet and its GUI. Input to be the *.AC3, output to be *.mpa at 192bps data rate (set in the AC3 page). Tick on Normalize and hit AC3 to MPA button.

Rename the *.mpa file to Encoded_Audio_1.mp2 and copy to your dvd2svcd work folder. Run dvd2svcd, in Misc tab hit the RECOVEr button, browse to you working folder & load in the *.d2s file. Then select Muxing & Cutting and hit CONTINUE button. It will then mux in the audio file and create your SVCD files. Play them in WinDVD or PowerDVD to test them before burning. If all is okay then burn. If not then there is still some problem with the extracted Audio file.

I downloaded and installed BeSweet and it's GUI. Could not find anything about *.mpa, or an AC3 page. There is no AC3 to MPA button either.

I am afraid your instructions are as clear as mud. Could you please give me clearer and simpler instructions since I am an idiot when it comes to Besweet, (never heard of it till this morning)!

Thanks again for your help.

As a follow-up, after further fiddling I found that there is a Ac3 to MP2 capability which I used. The resulting file is 65Mb. I then invoked the recover 9in DVD2SVCD as you suggested. The resulting file does not have sound in WMP, Realplayer or WinDVD Platinum.

What do I do now?

Thanks

I tend to prefer to point perople in the right direction and then let them help themselves by doing things themselves, that way they learn what they are doing rather than just following a detailed guide. As happened to yourself.

Open the mp2 file on WMP, does it play ? If not then you have a problem with your PC setup and not with DVD2SVCD. Are you able to play the mpg file on another PC with audio?

I have tried TMPegenc, IfoEdit and anything else I could find but nothing worked. I shall try another 34 hour conversion and if that does not work then I will right off the whole thing as a hoax and buy a Divx player.

I have been trying wih DVD2SVCD from 6:30pm till 3:15am and Cinema Craft Encoder constantly crashes after the audio part completes.

I have decided to pack the whole thing in and just buy a Divx player instead. After all the quality of Divx is much better than SVCD, and Divx players are going to be cheap and plentiful (I already saw two cheap models yesterday in the shop) so what is the point.

Thanks for your input anyway.